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7 - Perception and Production of Phonemic Contrasts in Heritage Russian and Polish in Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2024

By
Bernhard Brehmer ,
Tatjana Kurbangulova ,
Dominika Steinbach  and
Vladimir Arifulin
Edited by
Rajiv Rao
Rajiv Rao
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

We examined the production and perception of voiced versus voiceless obstruents by thirty-three adolescent heritage speakers of Polish and Russian. First, a word list task was used to elicit the production of voiced and voiceless plosives in word-initial position. Voice onset time (VOT) values for both sets of stops were compared to the values reported for monolingual Polish and Russian speakers. To investigate the perception of phoneme contrasts in the heritage language, we used an auditory phoneme discrimination task that contained ten minimal pairs of real and nonce words with contrasting voiced and voiceless obstruents. The results showed an almost perfect perceptual discrimination and a separation of voiced and voiceless plosives in production; however, the VOT values differed significantly from those of monolinguals. Both groups showed convergence of VOT values towards the values reported for fortis and lenis stops in the majority language (i.e., German), leading to a non-native accent in the heritage language.

Keywords

GermanyobstruentplosiveperceptionPolishRussianvoice onset timeVOTvoicing

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Type
Chapter
Information
The Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages , pp. 147 - 165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

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