Professor Amalia Arvaniti, from the Department of English Language & Linguistics, has just published a paper in the Journal of Phonetics, entitled ‘Voice Onset Time in SpanishEnglish Spontaneous Code-switching’.

Code-switching is the use of two languages in a single utterance, a common practice among bilingual speakers. Voice Onset Time (VOT) is the length of time between the end of a stop consonant, such as [p] or [t], and the onset of the next speech sound. In the research published, VOT duration was affected when speakers were code-switching rather than speaking in one of their two languages only. Phonetic changes when bilingual speakers are about to switch from one of their languages to the other had been reported before but this is the first study to document the phenomenon in spontaneous speech. The results argue in favour of theories advocating that bilinguals do not completely switch off one of their languages when speaking in the other, only suppress its activation; as a result, each language is affected by the other during speech.

The article, which is co-authored with Page Piccinini from the University of California San Diego, is published in Volume 52 of the journal, pp 121-137.