Phonetics of language attrition: Vowel production and articulatory setting in the speech of Western Armenian heritage speakers

This study investigates whether the age at which English becomes dominant for Western Armenian bilinguals in the United States affects their vowel production and articulatory setting in Western Armenian. Participating in the study were ten Western-Armenian bilinguals who learned English before age 8, ten bilinguals who did not learn English until adulthood, and one Western Armenian monolingual. Vowel production was measured using recordings from oral reading of a list of sentences. Recordings of oral narratives describing pictures were used to analyze articulatory setting.;Results showed that English affects the Western Armenian vowel system but only for those vowels that are already close to English. This bifurcation of vowel behavior indicates that a single across-the-board principle that governs the influence of a dominant language on a minority language is too general. Other forces such as universal tendencies, normal diachronic change, and sociolinguistic pressures must be considered. Also, even though the influence of English was stronger for those exposed to English as children than for those exposed as adults, the latter group showed significant changes in the direction of English. This means that the effects of the dominant language extend over a lifetime.;Measurements of articulatory setting showed no differences between the early and late learners of English based on their acquisition history or on their age at the time of the study. However, there: were differences in articulatory setting according to country of origin for later learners. Those whose acquisition of Western Armenian was interrupted by learning English in childhood did not show this effect. This leveling out of dialectal distinctions present in the speech of late learners of English may indicate the overshadowing influence of English or the operation of universal tendencies in first language acquisition.;The instrumental and statistical methods used in the study proved to be successful in investigating the phonetics of language attrition in an immigrant community. In particular, long term spectral analysis of articulatory setting was sensitive enough to identify within-language variation among bilinguals with different language histories.