Stop consonant production of French immersion students in Western Canada: A study of voice onset time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives/research questions: The present study investigates the development of French stop consonants among English-speaking children who are enrolled in an early French immersion program in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Our goal is to observe the stop consonant production pattern, and to determine whether interactions between the two language systems occur, while examining student progression with increasing experience. Methodology: Fifty-six students in grades 1, 3, and 5 participated in a speech production task administered in both English and French. For each language, they were asked to repeat a total of 54 words beginning with one of the six stop consonants, /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, and /g/. In addition, 45 age-matched monolingual English-speaking children were tested to serve as a control group. Data and analysis: Voice onset time (VOT) was the acoustic measure analyzed for each language and for children of each grade. An analysis of variance was conducted for language- and experience-related effects. Conclusions: For the French voiceless stops, French immersion students display non-native-like VOT values in the intermediate range between monolingual English voiced and voiceless stops. Their English voiceless stops exhibit higher VOT values than the monolinguals’ and are separate from those of their French. For voiced stops, their English and French are indistinguishable, located within the range of voiced stops for monolingual English speakers. Originality: Previous research on French–English bilingualism has generally been limited to adults. Furthermore, examination of French immersion students has rarely focused on their phonetic development, and acoustic analysis of this population is virtually non-existent. Implications: Our results highlight the importance of input, as well as social, and educational context in second language learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".