Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English

We report three experiments exploring the occurrence of perceptually-guided changes in speech production by a speaker well past the critical period for language acquisition. A first experiment shows that listeners sharing our speaker's native language (Brazilian Portuguese) can distinguish her productions in that language as having been produced either after recent experience in Brazil or after recent experience producing and listening to English in the United States. In contrast, native English speaking listeners cannot distinguish our speaker's English productions by recent experience. Acoustic measurements of our speaker's voiceless stops produced in both Brazilian Portuguese and English show that, whereas her VOTs are always shorter for productions in Brazilian Portuguese than in English, VOTs of stops produced in both languages are shorter after a several month stay in Brazil than after a several month stay in the United States. We offer a theoretical account of the findings. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.