| Research Abstract |
This study investigates the acquisition of second language(L2) speech in an immersion program from both phonetic and psycholinguistic points of view, and also tests the Speech Learning Model(SLM) hypothesized by Flege(1995). Specifically, the study examines whether or not English-speaking children in a Japanese immersion program, in which many content subjects are taught in Japanese, can successfully acquire segmental timing(i.e., voice onset time(VOT) and closure duration fur singletons and geminates) in Japanese, and can retain this ability despite the decrease of L2 input after they have exited the program. Data were collected from 15 children in a Japanese immersion program, 5 immersion teachers in the program, 10 Japanese monolinguals, 10 English monolinguals, and 10 English-speaking university students who exited a Japanese immersion program in elementary school(N=50). The informants were asked to repeat several target words with initial/p, t, k/for VOT, and medial/p, t, k/ and/pp, tt, kk/ for singletons and geminates in a sentence frame. Both VOT of the initial stops and closure duration of the medial stops were measured. The results show that 1) although both their singletons and geminates were significantly longer than those of the Japanese monolinguals, the immersion children acquired the contrast, and that 2) although they produced Japanese voiceless stops with significantly longer VOT values than the monolingual Japanese children, they produced them with significantly shorter VOT values than their English VOT. The findings suggest that 3) the bilingual children may have phonetic categories different from Ll speakers', which can be a L2 speaker's psychological strategy for differentiating between similar sounds in Ll and L2, and this will support Flege's SLM. Also, though the results are not conclusive, the immersion graduates seem to have retained their phonetic ability after they exited the program.
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