The Production of Laterals by English-Arabic Bilingual Children

Abstract

This study aims to measure the accentual feature of the acoustic properties of English and Arabic alveolar laterals produced by Arabic-English bilinguals. More precisely, it examines whether bilinguals develop or maintain separate spectral and temporal properties for the sounds of their community when these converge with the phonetic properties of their first language. Further, it investigates the effect of syllable position in the acoustic production of Arabic and English laterals. Finally, it explores if there is any phonetic convergence of the laterals in each language due to the elicitation of a bilingual language mode. The acoustic analysis of bilinguals' realizations of /l/ consists of the F1, F2, F2-F1, and F3-F2 differences values expressed in Hertz and Bark. These values are extracted from the midpoint of the laterals and realized in three contexts: word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions. The results reveal that bilinguals exhibit language-specific phonetic distribution and relatively acoustic accommodation in realizing laterals when code-switching tokens.