The acquisition of Voice Onset Time of L2 Italian by Chinese speakers: an experimental study

Abstract

The present study aims to measure the value of Voice Onset Time (VOT, the time interval between the occlusive sound explosion and the beginning of the periodic sound vibrations following) of bilabial occlusive consonants and alveolar occlusive consonants or dental Italian in oral production of Chinese speakers. In this experiment, the productions of the speakers were analyzed in the form of a spectrogram. The results of the analysis showed a strong decrease in VOT values by some Chinese speakers, which can be explained by the subsequent comparisons between deaf and sonorous occlusive in the two languages. The synophones, instead of creating a new phonetic category, have tried to replace the unaspirated deaf occlusive present in the L1 with the Italian sound occlusive because these two types of sounds, with some differences, fall into the same category, defined as short lag. This shows that the VOT is a phonological constraint that is not easy to overcome by non-native speakers and represents a phonetic-acoustic property that remains solid in the oral production of L2.