This chapter provides a thorough, up-to-date review of the literature on the phonetics and phonology of early bilinguals. It pulls together studies from a range of bilingual settings, including bilingual societies and heritage language contexts. While the chapter mostly reviews evidence from adolescent and adult participants, it also makes reference to the child bilingualism literature, where appropriate. The chapter first reviews studies on the accents of early versus late bilinguals, followed by a discussion of the various explanatory accounts for the observed differences between these two groups. Subsequently, the critical significance of early linguistic experience on bilingual speech patterns is considered, with particular reference to the evidence from childhood overhearers and international adoptees. The following sections then review studies comparing simultaneous and early sequential bilinguals, and those exploring the role of language dominance, continued use, the language of the environment in bilinguals’ pronunciation patterns, and the role of sociolinguistic factors in early bilingual speech patterns. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research.

This chapter examines the acquisition of vowels and consonants in perception and production during typical second language (L2) acquisition by sequential, dominant bilinguals. The acoustic and articulatory studies reviewed serve to illustrate general patterns of L2 segmental learning with a focus on four principal themes, each structured around one or two main research questions: 1) cross-linguistic influence (How does a sequential, dominant bilingual’s first language shape L2 segmental perception and production?); 2) development (Are there universal patterns to L2 segmental speech development? Are certain vocalic and consonantal phenomena acquired more easily?); 3) inter- and intralearner variability (What are the sources of differences in perception and/or production between learners and for the same learner over time and in different communicative contexts?); and 4) training effects (What are the effects of training on learning? How do variables such as task and stimuli type condition effectiveness?).

This chapter reviews available information on the phonetics and phonology of indigenous language bilinguals published in the last few decades, focusing on both of the bilinguals’ languages, the interplay between their phonological systems, and the phonetic realizations of the sounds present in their languages. We understand indigenous languages as predominantly minority languages spoken by linguistically distinct and often socially marginalized and vulnerable ethnic groups, autochthonous to a specific region of the world, and found in diglossias with majority international languages resulting from colonization. Indigenous language bilingualism is usually small-scale and involves speaking at least one minority indigenous language and at least one majority international language, thus being a step toward a seemingly inevitable language shift and in some cases an eventual indigenous language disappearance. The dynamic and asymmetrical character of indigenous bilingualism, along with the vast number of language combinations and the speaker community size differences between the members of these language pairs, sets it apart from other types of bilingualism considered in this book.

Mersea Island is a small island off the coast of north-east Essex, UK, which has a rich history of contact, ranging from Viking and Roman settlements to more modern influxes of evacuees and military personnel during both World Wars. The island itself also has a history of isolation, due to its only access road being cut off regularly by lunar tides. However, this isolation has been challenged over more recent years by various building projects, resulting in a large influx of non-islanders moving and settling on the island. This overview will present a range of phonological features across both the consonantal and vocalic systems of Mersea Island English as evidence from both older and younger Islanders to highlight traditional features and the direction of change within the community as a whole. A selection of morphosyntactic features which highlight more salient structures of Mersea Island English is then presented before a discussion of how we may wish to evaluate paths of change moving forward in relation to both socio-cultural and linguistic factors.

The chapter deals with segmental and suprasegmental features of English spoken by residents of England without a recent migration history – though two major new varieties, British Asian English and Multicultural London English, are briefly discussed. While the emphasis is on the period since the turn of the twenty-first century, the chapter also deals with changes since the 1960s. The chapter begins with a presentation of recent technological advances, such as magnetic resonance imaging and innovative quantitative cartographic techniques. This is followed by a discussion of consonants, vowels, rhythm, stress, intonation and voice quality. The chapter goes on to show how some features are involved in levelling at the national or regional level, while other local and regional features are maintained. Using older dialectological sources as well as contemporary sociolinguistic methods, four regions are discussed, those centred on London, Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester. The evidence shows similarities (a general reduction in variation) and differences (maintenance of differences between neighbouring cities). Levelling in the South East involves a shift of vowels towards Received Pronunciation-like variants, while consonants do not take part in this change; the exception is the rapid loss of traditional h-dropping. Finally, the influence of standardisation is discussed.

Following our discussion of English vowels in Chapter 3 and rhoticity in Chapter 4, this chapter introduces you to English consonants, as well as variation in consonant inventories across varieties of English. We begin the chapter with a discussion of the characteristics of consonants, focusing on the classification of consonant sounds by place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing. This overview also examines consonant inventories cross-linguistically, to help you understand which consonants – and consonant features – are the most common across languages, and why.

The next two sections of the chapter provide an overview of English consonants by introducing the consonant phonemes common to many varieties of English, with variation in these inventories discussed as relevant. A brief overview of modern-day spelling of English consonants is also given. Consonant variation within varieties of English and phonological rules that govern this variation are then discussed. In the final section of the chapter, you will be guided through exercises designed to check your understanding of the content of the chapter and an analysis of your own English consonant inventory.

Discussion of English segments, both vowels and consonants, and their representation in terms of distinctive features.

This chapter provides an introductory overview of the phonological systems used in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with an overview of the various systems of consonants and vowels that are found, and the phonotactic principles by which those segments are combined to form syllables. The closely-related phenomena of register and tone are then introduced and defined, followed by an outline of the processes of tonogenesis, by which a language can develop a tone system. The chapter closes with a discussion of further aspects of the area’s sound systems, including tone sandhi, intonation, the prosodic hierarchy and criteria for different notions of ‘word’.

Previous studies have shown that directing learners’ attention during perceptual training facilitates detection and learning of unfamiliar consonant categories (Guion & Pederson, 2007; Pederson & Guion, 2010). The current study asks whether this attentional directing can also facilitate other types of phonetic learning. Monolingual Mandarin speakers were divided into two groups directed to learn either 1) the consonants or 2) the tones in an identification training task with the same set of Southern Min monosyllabic words containing the consonants /pʰ, p, b, kh, k, ɡ, tɕʰ, tɕ, ɕ/ and the tones (55, 33, 22, 24, 41). All subjects were also tested with an AXB discrimination task (with a distinct set of Southern Min words) before and after the training. Unsurprisingly, both groups improved accuracy in the sound type to which they attended. However, the consonant-attending group did not improve in discriminating tones after training and neither did the tone-attending group in discriminating consonants -- despite both groups having equal exposure to the same training stimuli. When combined with previous results for consonant and vowel training, these results suggest that explicitly directing learners’ attention has a broadly facilitative effect on phonetic learning including of tonal contrasts.

The goal of this study was to examine the role of cognitive abilities in implicit learning of two types of contrasts — lexical tone contrasts and coronal consonant contrasts. Twenty-four adult native English speakers naïve to Vietnamese were asked to learn the names of twelve funny monsters, that is monosyllabic words differing in tones and initial consonants. After a word-identification training with feedback, learning was assessed using a 12-word alternative test and an auditory discrimination test. In addition, participants completed six tests of cognitive abilities involving episodic memory, working memory, executive function and attention, processing speed, and vocabulary (NIH & Northwestern University, 2006-2012). For both identification and discrimination, the proportion of tone errors was significantly larger than the proportion of consonant errors, but cognitive measures did not predict the occurrence of tone versus consonant errors. Processing speed and executive function and attention scores were significantly correlated with response accuracies in both tests. These results suggest that for beginning learners, individual differences in some cognitive abilities related to the fluid cognition complex correlate with implicit learning of phonetic categories of different types. However, working memory, arguably the most studied factor, appears not to matter in this learning scenario.