In previous research, covert contrast in child language has mainly been found in English-speaking and non-typically developing children. Since Dutch, like English, contrasts voiced and voiceless...Show moreIn previous research, covert contrast in child language has mainly been found in English-speaking and non-typically developing children. Since Dutch, like English, contrasts voiced and voiceless plosives, it is likely that Dutch speaking children also produce a covert contrast when learning to differentiate between these different plosives. In order to test this hypothesis a data sample from a Dutch child was used to measure and compare the voice onset time (VOT) of bilabial plosives, which were all transcribed as [p], but for which the target form was either voiced (/b/) or voiceless (/p/). A single-sample T-test with bootstrapping was performed to test the difference between the VOT means. Although the mean VOT for voiceless plosives which had a voiced target form was shorter than for plosives with a voiceless target, the difference was not significant, indicating that no covert contrast in VOT was present in this data. However, as the sample size was quite small, with only one subject and 74 utterances, no large-scale conclusions can be drawn for the Dutch population yet.Show less
This thesis examines the origin of cross-linguistic influence on the realization of the voice onset time of English L3 stop consonants produced by simultaneous bilingual speakers who speak at least...Show moreThis thesis examines the origin of cross-linguistic influence on the realization of the voice onset time of English L3 stop consonants produced by simultaneous bilingual speakers who speak at least one non-European Indo-European language. The participants were asked to read a list of words with stop consonants in word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions. By comparing the values of the voice onset time realized by the three participants with the voice onset time values of their two first languages, a conclusion was drawn about the origin of the cross-linguistic influence. This thesis concludes that both of a simultaneous bilingual speaker’s first languages are a combined source of cross-linguistic influence and that this influence is determined by the perceived typology of the language and the feature that is being affected.Show less
