Early bilingual acquisition of the voicing contrast in English and Spanish

A case study of a child acquiring English and Spanish in England between the ages of 1;7 and 2;3 is presented. VOT measurements of utterance-initial stops in English and Spanish were made of productions at ages 1;7, 1;11, and 2;3. Similar measurements of the parents' Spanish speech were made. While the child had developed an adult-like voicing contrast in English by age 2;3, she had not done so in Spanish. However, there were signs of a contrast developing in Spanish, based on small lag differences. Similar lag differences were found in the input. The results are accounted for in terms of the relatively greater acoustic salience of the lag differences in English compared with those in Spanish. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited