The Impact of Vowel Inventory Size and Linguistic Environment when Learning Two Languages: The Case of English and Greek

Producing phonemic contrasts in two typologically different languages, can prove a difficult task for speakers of those languages, even experienced ones (for instance, Boersma & Escudero, 2008; Kivistö-de Souza & Carlet, 2014), from birth or otherwise. This thesis discusses the effects of linguistic environment and phonemic inventories in the production of British English vowels. Greek and English were chosen as a language pair for further investigation, due to the fact that their vocalic inventories differ significantly in terms of the number of phonemes each has, the phonemic categories identified, as well as the vowel features in each. In order to explore the role of the linguistic environment, groups of bilingual Greek - English children based in the United Kingdom and in Greece took part in the first round of experiments. In order to explore further the role of phonemic inventories a group of native Greek second language learners of English also took part in the same set of tasks. The productions of British English vowels and vowel contrasts by each participant group was assessed by a series of speech production tasks analysing acoustic properties of the vowel categories in question. Bilingual children in Greece performed in a similar manner to monolingual controls, however, children raised in the UK deviated from monolingual norms. Quality of input and amount of exposure to each language in the two linguistic environments seem to be predicting factors for vowel production outcomes. Native Greek second language learners of English produced British English vowels similarly to monolingual controls when it came to both spectral and temporal cues. This could be attributed to the amount of experience second language learners had with English throughout their lifespan.