Characterizing Speech Sound Productions in Bilingual Speakers of Jamaican Creole and English: Application of Durational Acoustic Methods

Abstract

Purpose: This study examined the speech acoustic characteristics of Jamaican Creole (JC) and English in bilingual preschoolers and adults using acoustic duration measures. The aims were to determine if, for JC and English, (a) child and adult acoustic duration characteristics differ, (b) differences occur in preschoolers' duration patterns based on the language spoken, and (c) relationships exist between the preschoolers' personal contextual factors (i.e., age, sex, and percentage of language [%language] exposure and use) and acoustic duration. Method: Data for this cross-sectional study were collected in Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City, New York, United States, during 2013–2019. Participants included typically developing simultaneous bilingual preschoolers ( n = 120, ages 3;4–5;11 [years;months]) and adults ( n = 15, ages 19;0–54;4) from the same linguistic community. Audio recordings of single-word productions of JC and English were collected through elicited picture-based tasks and used for acoustic analysis. Durational features (voice onset time [VOT], vowel duration, whole-word duration, and the proportion of vowel to whole-word duration) were measured using Praat, a speech analysis software program. Results: JC-English–speaking children demonstrated developing speech motor control through differences in durational patterns compared with adults, including VOT for voiced plosives. Children's VOT, vowel duration, and whole-word duration were produced similarly across JC and English. The contextual factor %language use was predictive of vowel and whole-word duration in English. Conclusions: The findings from this study contribute to a foundation of understanding typical bilingual speech characteristics and motor development as well as schema in JC–English speakers. In particular, minimal acoustic duration differences were observed across the post-Creole continuum, a feature that may be attributed to the JC–English bilingual environment. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21760469