The speech elicitation task affects temporal but not spectral properties in trilinguals’ speech production

• Stoehr, Antje ^[1] ; Souganidis, Christoforos ^[3] ; Thomas, Trisha ^[2] ; Jacobsen, Jessi ^[1] ; Martin, Clara D. ^[1]
  1. [1] Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language

     Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language

     San Sebastián, España

     
  2. [2] Harvard University

     Harvard University

     City of Cambridge, Estados Unidos

     
  3. [3] HiTZ Basque Center for Language Technology

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• Localización: International journal of multilingualism, ISSN 1479-0718, Vol. 23, Nº. 3, 2026, págs. 1376-1393
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Research investigating phonetic properties in bi- or multilinguals’ speech often uses picture naming or word reading tasks for speech elicitation. This methodological choice has been shown to affect temporal properties of L1 speech production, but it remains unclear whether such task differences likewise affect multilinguals’ speech production and what the implications for phonetic research are. We tested 55 Spanish–Basque–English trilinguals in a picture naming and a word reading task in all three languages. We measured naming latencies, word durations, initial phoneme durations (voice onset times for voiceless plosives and devoicing proportion of voiced plosives), medial phoneme durations, and the first and second formants of the English vowels /iː/ and /ɪ/. No spectral differences were detectable but temporal differences between tasks emerged across languages even though they were not uniform, partly replicating previous results from L1 research. Since the detected temporal differences between tasks were small, we conclude that both tasks are suitable for investigating phonetic detail in multilinguals’ speech production, but attention should be paid to incongruent letter-to-sound mappings between languages in word reading tasks.