Interlingual phonetic interactions of Japanese-English bilinguals: Do cognate status and task type affect the production of voice onset time?

Aims and objectives: This study examines how cognate status and elicitation tasks affect Voice Onset Time (VOT) production in advanced Japanese-English bilinguals. It investigates whether bilinguals exhibit phonetic cross-linguistic influence in both their first (L1) and second (L2) languages and compares their L2 productions to a native English baseline to assess phonetic attainment. Design/methodology/approach: VOT data for word-initial /k/ were collected from 28 advanced Japanese-English bilinguals and a control group of 6 native English speakers. Participants produced cognate and non-cognate words in both Japanese (bilinguals only) and English using two tasks: picture naming and sentence reading. Data and analysis: A total of 2016 tokens from the bilinguals and 216 from the native speakers were acoustically analyzed. Mean VOT values were submitted to a mixed-design ANOVA to compare the groups’ English productions and a repeated-measures ANOVA to analyze the bilinguals’ productions across both languages. Findings/conclusions: A significant three-way interaction between Language, Word Status, and Task Type was found for the bilinguals, indicating that the phonetic cognate effect is modulated by both the language context and task demands. Critically, bilinguals exhibited a significant cognate effect in their English productions (shorter VOTs for cognates), a pattern not found to be statistically significant in the native speaker group. Bilinguals’ English VOTs were also significantly shorter overall than those of the native speakers. Originality: This study is the first to investigate phonetic cognate effects in a language pair with differing orthographies (Japanese-English) while also comparing different production tasks and including a native-speaker baseline. Significance/implications: The results provide robust evidence for the continuous co-activation of a bilingual’s two languages during speech production. The findings are discussed within an exemplar-based model of bilingual phonology, highlighting the intricate interplay of lexical and phonetic factors in shaping bilingual speech.