Apples and … Bears?: A VOT Study on Covert Contrast of Labial Plosives in L1 English and L1 Dutch Children

Persistent URL of this record https://hdl.handle.net/1887/4108716

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Taalwetenschap (BA)

Hill, Astrid (2024)

Apples and … Bears?: A VOT Study on Covert Contrast of Labial Plosives in L1 English and L1 Dutch Children

Bachelor thesis | Taalwetenschap (BA)

Voice onset time measurements were conducted on labial plosive pronunciations of English and Dutch children between the ages of 0;11.04 - 4;00.02 in a longitudinal spoken child language corpus. This was done to see whether there is a covert contrast between the participants’ correctly and incorrectly pronounced bilabial plosives. A pairwise t-test showed that there is a covert contrast between what English children intended as [pᑋ] and what they intended as [b], although these two forms were both transcribed by adults as [b]. Similarly, a pairwise t-test showed that there is a covert contrast between what Dutch children intended as [ ̬b] and what they intended as [p], although these two forms were both transcribed by adults as [p]. It was also found that while English and Dutch participants both reverted to a short-lag labial plosive, the VOT values of these short-lag plosives did not overlap between the languages.