An acoustic comparison of voiceless fricatives in heritage, native, and L2 speakers in Japanese

When acquiring new languages, learners may encounter sounds that are not present in their phonetic inventory leading them to produce more varied sounds in comparison to a native speaker. However, it is important to also consider the behavior of heritage speakers (HS) as they acquired a minority language with varied input, in comparison to their majority language, during their developmental years. The present study investigates two voiceless fricatives—bilabial and palatal— that occur in Japanese but not in English to determine how HS produce these sounds. Specifically, the present study evaluates whether HS productions are more native-like or if they are producing sounds more like L2 speakers. Acoustic correlates of fricatives will be measured from loan and non-loan Japanese words in word-initial and -medial position. The measurements are compared with the productions of HS of Japanese to the production of L1 and L2 speakers of Japanese. The findings from this study contribute to the understanding of how early language environments influence production of speech sounds in a minority language in the household.