VOT in French as a foreign language: A production and perception study with mono- and multilingual learners (German/Mandarin-Chinese)

Abstract

This study addresses the production of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in French as a foreign language (FFL). The learners are young multilingual learners who speak Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language along with German. To determine potential effects of the learners’ multilingual background, these multilingual learners were compared to three control groups: (1) monolingual German learners of FFL, (2) monolingual Mandarin Chinese learners of FFL, and (3) native speakers of French (L1). In addition, a perception experiment was carried out to find out to what extent the VOT values measured in the production data contribute to the perception of foreign accent. Our results show that multilingual learners perform similar to monolingual learners, suggesting that multilingual learners are neither advantaged nor disadvantaged when acquiring the phonology of a foreign language. Furthermore, the learners’ perceived accent in the perception data study mirrors the results from the production study.