the United States’ (pp. 421−422). Here, it appeared that at least one listener
perceived VOT deviances from a monolingual norm in the speech of the late
consecutive bilingual.
Similarly, a larger study reported in de Leeuw et al. (2010) investigated 57
German native speakers who had moved to either Anglophone Canada or the
Dutch Netherlands in adulthood. The bilinguals’ semi-spontaneous German
speech was assessed for foreign accent by monolingual German speakers in
Germany (1 = definitely native speaker, 6 = definitely non-native speaker). It
was revealed that 14 bilingual migrants were perceived to be non-native
speakers of their native German language. As displayed in Table 2.2, partici-
pants 11 and 6 had arrived in Canada at 32 years of age (FAR = 5.05 and 5.11
respectively) and participant 40 arrived at 43 years of age (FAR = 5.47).
No significant difference was revealed between the foreign accent ratings
of the English L2 and the Dutch L2 speakers; both L2 groups were just as
likely to develop a foreign accent in their native speech. Instead, age of arrival
to Canada or the Netherlands and contact with one’s native language played
the most significant roles in determining whether the German native speech
of the bilinguals was assessed to be foreign accented. It appeared that not
only the amount of contact, but also the type of contact influenced foreign
accented native speech. German native speakers with both English and
Dutch as an L2 who had a high amount of L1 contact in settings in which
language mixing was not expected to occur were less likely to be perceived
as non-native speakers in their L1 than those migrants who had less L1 con-
tact in such ‘pure’ settings. Moreover, this effect was more substantial in
Maturational Constraints in Bilingual Speech 33Table 2.2 Foreign accent rating (FAR), age of arrival (AOA) and L2 of those late
consecutive bilinguals assessed to be non-native speakers of their native German
Participant FAR L2 AOA
13 4.53 English 22
16 4.58 English 21
36 4.84 English 27
11 5.05 Dutch 32
61 5.05 English 17
6 5.11 English 32
31 5.16 English 21
39 5.16 English 20
40 5.47 Dutch 43
21 5.53 Dutch 19
56 5.53 English 21
41 5.58 Dutch 23
25 5.68 Dutch 17
15 5.84 English 21