Abstract:
The present study deals with the speech production by bilinguals in both languages. The objective speech sounds are Japanese and English stop consonants. Japanese stop consonants are very similar to English ones, but is is well-known that the voice onset time of stop consonants for both languages are different from one another. The aim of this study is to examine the voice onset time of Japanese and English stop consonants uttered by the returnees (Japanese--English bilinguals) under the different linguistic circumstances. It was found that there were three types for the returnees in the production of stop consonants. These results are compared with those of Japanese who learned English.