Voice Onset Time in multilingual speakers: Italian heritage speakers in Germany with L3 English

Abstract

This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and English as L3. The study aims to identify the extent to which the HSs produce distinct values across all three languages, or whether crosslinguistic influence (CLI) occurs. To this end, we compare the HSs’ voice onset time (VOT) values with those of L2 English speakers from Italy and Germany. The language triad exhibits overlapping and distinct VOT realizations, making VOT a potentially vulnerable category. Results indicate CLI from German into Italian, although a systemic difference is maintained. When speaking English, the