This study examines VOT in L3 English in German-dominant HSs of Italian with differing amounts of HL use. We find that transfer from the dominant language persists and, unlike global foreign accent in the same population, no role was found for individual differences in amounts of HL use.
The present study investigates the acquisition of L3 VOT in heritage speakers (HSs) with differing amounts of heritage language (HL) use across the lifespan. We compare the VOT values of 20 Italian HSs living in Germany with those of L2 learners of English from Italy (L1I-L2E) and Germany (L1G-L2E), and with monolingual English speakers. While German displays a similar VOT pattern to English (commonly classified as short-lag as opposed to long-lag VOT), Italian contrasts voiced and voiceless stops on the basis of lead-voicing as opposed to short-lag. This language triad thus exhibits both overlapping and distinct VOT realizations, making VOT a potentially vulnerable category. A picture sequence was used to elicit target words that started with /p, k, b, g/. Our results show that VOT values do not pattern with the HL (voiceless: β=-26.66, SE=7.02, t=-3.80, p< .001; voiced: β=4.04, SE=.40, z=10.16, p< .001). Instead, the values fall within the range of German for both categories (70-90ms, 0-55% prevoiced). In the between-group comparison with monolinguals and L2ers, the HSs perform significantly better than the L1I-L2E group for voiceless and voiced plosives (voiceless: β=-12.26, SE=5.49, t=-2.24, p< .05, voiced: β=4.29, SE=.61, z=7.06, p< .001) and behave similarly to the L1G-L2E. Since English and German display similar contrast between voiceless and voiced plosives, the HSs have an advantage over the L1I-L2E group. Further, our results indicate that, unlike L3 foreign accent in the same population of HSs (Lloyd-Smith, in prep.), the source of transfer in VOT production is unaffected by diverging amounts of HL use. This result is in line with Llama & López-Morelos (2016) and Gabriel et al. (2016), who also found that HSs transferred L3 VOT values from their dominant language.
