Cross-language Influence in the Stop Voicing Contrast in Heritage Tagalog

In heritage bilinguals’ sound structure, some aspects of the sound system are more prone to cross-language influence than others. In this study, we compare two different models of crosslanguage influence, a phonological markedness based model, which proposes that influence selectively affects a phonologically marked structure, and a phonetic category based model, where influence is mediated through cross-language equivalence classification of similar phones. The empirical data for the study comes from the production of the voicing contrast in English and Tagalog stops by heritage Tagalog speakers in Toronto. We compare the heritage speakers’ production with native control productions and also probe the effect of lexical stress in voicing realization as evidence for the underlying target structure of stop categories. The key empirical findings are that the heritage speakers produce their voiceless stops in both languages nearly native-like, including a native-like stress effect, but voiced stops exhibit considerable crosslanguage influence and assimilatory stress effects. We propose that the heritage speakers successfully establish separate phonetic categories for English and Tagalog voiceless stops, but form a partially merged category for English and Tagalog voiced stops. The findings provide partial support for the phonetic category based model of influence over the phonological markedness based model.