ABSTRACT
This chapter has two goals. First, it investigates the effect of long-term bilingualism on patterns of temporal organization of speech in a unique language-contact situation in Patagonia, Argentina. Second, it examines specific aspects of the phonetic and phonological grammars that contribute to cross-language transfer effects. Our analysis draws from a corpus of read speech obtained from three speaker groups: L1 Afrikaans/L2 Spanish bilingual speakers who live in Patagonia, Argentina; speakers of L1 Spanish, also from Patagonia, Argentina; and speakers of L1 Afrikaans from South Africa. Addressing the first goal, we show that Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals display native-like patterns in consonant variability in both languages, but not in vowel variability. Specifically, the bilingual speakers show native-like patterns in the vowel variability of their L2 Spanish but not of their L1 Afrikaans. For the second goal, we show that differences between the Afrikaans control and bilingual speakers stem from differences in how each speaker group controls local segmental duration in their speech, namely, via phonemic vowel contrasts, stress-induced vowel reduction, and final lengthening. We argue that this finding of L2-to-L1 influence for vowels (but not consonants) derives from a combination of two forces: the presence of phonetic and phonological processes affecting vowels in L1 Afrikaans, and the relative complexity of phonotactic patterns in Afrikaans compared to Spanish. Altogether, our findings speak to the malleability of temporal organization patterns in bilingual grammars, especially in situations of close long-term contact where the L2 becomes the dominant language.
