Relative cue weighting in multilingual stop voicing production

Nominated for Best Student Paper.

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Abstract: How does a multilingual speaker produce similar phonological contrasts across the different languages that they speak? Some theories predict crosslinguistic influence while others predict that multilinguals keep separate sound inventories for each language. In this paper, we present crosslinguistic data from early multilingual speakers in Malaysia. We investigate the interaction of a true voicing language (Malay), a variable voicing language (English), and an aspiration language (Mandarin). Using a random forest classification of nine acoustic correlates of stop voicing, we show that 1) all early multilinguals show language-specific productions of stop voicing, and 2) variation driven by dominance can still be observed despite this language specificity. In addition, we present evidence that closure voicing is a salient correlate alongside aspiration in Malaysian English, and that English is more reliant on secondary correlates than Malay and Mandarin.

Recommended citation: Chan, L. X., & Heuser, A. (2025). “Relative cue weighting in multilingual stop voicing production.” In Proceedings of Interspeech 2025.