‘A gup of dea, please’: Crosslinguistic influence in word-initial stop production and perception in multilingual speakers of German, English and Dutch

Although crosslinguistic influence in voice onset time (VOT) is a widely studied phenomenon (Flege, 1987; Simon, 2009), few studies look at more than two languages. This study examines the production and perception of the word-initial stops /p, t, k, b, d, g/ in Dutch, English and German. The participant are German students who speak English as an L2 and have recently acquired a language with a different VOT contrast between voiced and voiceless stops, namely prevoiced Dutch. The aim of this study was to uncover and compare evidence for crosslinguistic influence (CLI) between prevoiced Dutch and aspirated English/German, elicited by means of a picture-naming task and an AXB discrimination task performed by a group of frequent users of Dutch, less frequent users and a control group. An acoustic analysis revealed that the frequent users produced significantly shorter voiceless stops and more prevoicing in both Dutch and English than the other groups did. However, all participants produced native VOTs in German, indicating that the L2 is more easily affected by CLI than the L1 is. Besides, all subjects seemed to rely on the L1 perception mode under adverse listening conditions, as they all had difficulties with discriminating the non-native contrast between prevoiced and short-lag stops.