Vowel-initial glottalization constitutes a cue to prosodic prominence, realized on a strength continuum from creaky phonation to complete glottal stops. While there is considerable research on children’s early utilization of acoustic cues for stress marking, less is understood about the specific implementation of vowel-initial glottalization in American English. Eight sequences of function + novel words were elicited from groups of 5-to-8-year-olds, 8-to-11-year-olds, and adults. Children exhibit a similar rate of prevocalic glottalization to adults but differ in its phonetic implementation, producing a higher rate of glottal stops compared to creaky phonation with respect to adults.

This study investigates the sound system of heritage speakers (henceforth, HSs) as they shift dominance from their heritage language to their majority language. Specifically, it analyzes the production of intrusive vowels in Spanish consonant clusters across the lifespan of HSs, focusing on tautosyllabic clusters (i.e., /Cɾ/) and heterosyllabic clusters (i.e., /ɾ.C/). Semi-spontaneous speech was elicited from three age groups of Spanish HSs—younger children, older children, and adults—for whom American English is the majority language, as well as from three age-matched groups of non-heritage Spanish speakers raised in Mexico. The presence and duration of intrusive vowels were examined, with the latter calculated as a ratio of intrusive vowel duration to tap duration. Overall, the results indicate that all speaker groups more frequently produce consonant clusters with intrusive vowels than without. However, Spanish HSs produced fewer and shorter intrusive vowels compared with their non-heritage counterparts. In addition, heritage and non-heritage speakers exhibited a lower rate of intrusive vowel production in the 5-to-8 -year-old group compared with adults. Despite this, the absence of an interaction between age group and speaker type suggests a parallel pattern of change in intrusive vowel production across all ages. Voicing emerged as the most consistent phonetic factor, predicting a higher rate of intrusive vowels with a longer duration relative to the tap.

Crosslinguistic influence (i.e., CLI, henceforth) in trilingual speakers is multidirectional and shaped by factors such as the amount of exposure to, and use of, each of the speaker’s languages. This study investigates whether relative dominance explains progressive and regressive CLI in trilingual speakers. To this purpose, we examine the production of word-external vocalic sequences (i.e., /V#V/) in L3 English speakers who are Catalan-Spanish bilinguals. Participants completed a reading task in English, Spanish, and Catalan that elicited vowel-to-vowel sequences along four levels of stress (i.e., stressed-stressed, unstressed-stressed, stressed-unstressed, unstressed-unstressed). Alongside the production task, they filled out a trilingual version of the Bilingual Language Profile (i.e., BLP, henceforth) (Birdsong et al. 2012). The resulting vocalic sequences were classified as instances of glottal marking (i.e., creaky phonation or complete glottal stop) or modal phonation. To examine the role of dominance, we ran a Principal Component Analysis on the questionnaire data, identifying four principal components that explained 57.9% of the variance. We compared L3 English vowel-to-vowel sequences with those of Spanish-English bilinguals who speak Catalan as an L3, as well as with L1 English monolinguals. We ran dominance-based logistic regressions for each language. In English, our results show that L3 English speakers differ from their L3 Catalan Spanish-English bilingual counterparts in unstressedstressed vowel sequences, but differ across all four stress levels when compared to L1 English monolinguals. Dominance-related principal components do not predict the rate of glottal marking in L3 English. In L1 Catalan and L1 Spanish, the use of glottalization is predicted by the average rate of glottal marking in the speakers’ L3 English productions, as well as by higher scores on the principal component associated with L3 English dominance. In Spanish, vowel-initial glottal marking is predicted by scores associated with low Spanish dominance. These findings highlight that dominance mediates CLI in trilingual speakers, which in turn reflects the dynamic nature of CLI in multilingual speakers.