VOT Production among schoolchildren in Francophone vs. French immersion schools in Anglo-dominant Southern Alberta

The present study reports a speech production experiment on children who are enrolled in a Francophone K-12 school in Southern Alberta, Canada, a predominantly English-speaking region. Students from grades 1, 3, and 5 were asked to produce a series of French words beginning with one of the six stop consonants (voiced /b/, /d/, & /g/; voiceless /p/, /t/, & /k/). Results revealed no agerelated difference across the three grades. Furthermore, when compared with previous research on children who are native speakers of Quebec French, these Francophone schoolchildren produced voiceless stops with native-like values but voiced stops with values closer to English. Their stop productions were also compared with a recent study on students from a local French immersion elementary school, who produced both voiced and voiceless stops with English-like values. The results thus illustrate the effects of the social as well as the educational context in bilingual children’s speech production.