This study examines the voice onset time (VOT) in voiced and voiceless plosives of Dutch late-language learners of English. Dutch contrasts prevoicing with short-lag VOT, while English has a short...Show moreThis study examines the voice onset time (VOT) in voiced and voiceless plosives of Dutch late-language learners of English. Dutch contrasts prevoicing with short-lag VOT, while English has a short-lag and long lag VOT contrast, making them an interesting language pair to look at for bilingual research. In order to find naturalistic VOT values, the data used for this study was found by analysing five speakers as case studies on YouTube. The data was collected in Dutch, English and code-switched sentences. Although there were individual differences, some speakers managed to produce native-like English VOT values for both the voiceless and the voiced plosives. In code-switched utterances, the VOT values for the voiceless plosives were slightly higher than the Dutch values, while the voiced plosives were still produced with prevoicing. Some speakers were thus able to maintain separate categories in both languages, although there was more L1 interference in code-switched contexts. The data also showed that the velar and alveolar plosives followed by a sonorant consonant in English and code-switched contexts contained higher VOT means than those followed by a vowel, suggesting that these are easier to acquire for an L2 learner.Show less
