Paper on bilingualism and sound change in Language
A research article entitled “On the cognitive basis of contact-induced sound change: Vowel merger reversal in Shanghainese” (Yao & Chang, 2016) has been published in the June issue of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America.
Abstract: This study investigates the source and status of a recent sound change in Shanghainese (Wu, Sinitic) that has been attributed to language contact with Mandarin. The change involves two vowels, /e/ and /ɛ/, reported to be merged three decades ago but produced distinctly in contemporary Shanghainese. Results of two production experiments show that speaker age, language mode (monolingual Shanghainese vs. bilingual Shanghainese-Mandarin), and crosslinguistic phonological similarity all influence the production of these vowels. These findings provide evidence for language contact as a linguistic means of merger reversal and are consistent with the view that contact phenomena originate from cross-language interaction within the bilingual mind.
Note that this article is accompanied by online appendices, located here.