Monolingual speech production in a bilingual context

In language contact contexts, monolinguals may have knowledge of another language due to exposure. We tested the phonetic and phonological knowledge of 20 English monolinguals from Southern California (an English-Spanish contact community) on a bilingual task. We analysed their productions of /l/ and /p t k/, phonetically different phonemes that vary by context in English but not Spanish. Specifically, English /l/ varies in “darkness” due to an allophonic velarization rule, while /p t k/ vary in voice onset time due to an allophonic aspiration rule. Results suggest that socalled monolinguals in contact contexts may have phonetic but not phonological knowledge of the “unknown” contact language. Participants showed a qualitative difference between their productions of the same phonemes shared by the two languages, but transferred allophonic patterns of English to their Spanish productions. We consider these findings in light of future research that compares monolingual and bilingual speech production.