Geminate attrition across three generations of Farsi-English Bilinguals living in Canada: An Acoustic Study

The 1.5 generation category distinguishes children of Iranian immigrants who had acquired Farsi as their first language and came to Canada between the ages of five to fourteen from second generation heritage speakers of Farsi. The productions of the bilinguals were compared with the productions of three homeland variety controls. A word-naming task, which included 108 words was conducted.

Using Praat software, 2398 tokens were acoustically analyzed. Attrition was defined in terms of changes in mean duration of geminates relative to their singleton counterparts, percentage of geminate-singleton degemination, and category overlap. Mean durations were then analyzed using a 3-way, mixed-model, repeated-measures ANOVA.

Results showed that geminates attrite across different successive generations. Moreover, there was some evidence to suggest that geminate realization across generations patterns with typological patterns previously reported, showing that universal phonetic principles such as aerodynamic constraints/articulatory difficulty and acoustic/perceptual salience also constrain geminate realization in bilingual Farsi-English speakers.

However, there was no evidence to suggest that more marked geminates suffer a higher degree of attrition. This is the first study to examine the attrition of a typologically marked contrast, which considers the role of universal phonetic principles, markedness in an understudied bilingual community across different generations.