This research investigates early bilinguals' production of voiceless plosives in both English and Portuguese as far as VOT lag is concerned, in order to detect if subtle differences in the phonetic realization of a phonological contrast typical of monolinguals' production is reproduced in their speech. The speech material consisted of 3 Portuguese words and 3 English words in carrier sentences. The recordings were submitted to acoustic analyses using the CSRE (Canadian Speech Research Environment). The results indicate that early bilinguals do not keep their two linguistic codes apart. The data show evidence that their competence is based on a restructured system characterized by acoustics and articulatory properties derived from the interaction of the phonetic systems of the languages involved and of other variables such as age, family and social linguistic background.
Bilingualism; Portuguese/English voiceless plosives; VOT
