Abstract
In this paper we offer an Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) based description of rhotics in bilingual speakers from South-Tyrol. In particular we examine whether adult Italian/Tyrolean bilinguals display differentiated patterns of articulation for rhotics in each language they speak and whether bilinguals’ articulatory patterns in each examined language are similar to those used by almost monolingual speakers or not. Intraspeaker comparison shows that very late sequential bilinguals do not present distinct articulatory patterns for rhotics in the two languages, while the simultaneous bilingual do. Besides interspeaker comparison shows that articulatory patterns for rhotics used by simultaneous monolinguals differ from those used by the very late sequential bilingual speakers. This data helps to understand how phonological categories are organized by bilinguals, and tackles the long debated issue regarding the possibility that bilinguals make use of a single shared phonological system or of two separate ones