Abstract

This presentation explores the outcomes of long-term cross-language transfer effects on different domains of bilingual phonological grammar. Our study focuses on a unique Afrikaans-Spanish bilingual community that has lived in Patagonia, Argentina since the early 1900’s. In this presentation, we will focus in particular on the production of voiced and voiceless plosives by the Afrikaans-Spanish bilingual speakers in comparison to productions by control L1 Spanish speakers and non-Spanish speaking L1 Afrikaans speakers. Our findings suggest that there are L1-to-L2 transfer effects in especially the production of voiced plosives in the speech of the Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals (i.e., Afrikaans influences their Spanish). We contrast these findings with our previous research on the durational properties of vowels, which showed L2-to-L1 (but not L1-to-L2) transfer effects for the same group of speakers. Altogether, our findings speak to the malleability of pronunciation patterns in bilingual speech, especially in situations of close long-term contact where the L2 becomes the dominant language.