VOT production, writing skills, and general proficiency in multilingual learners of French: approaching the intertwinement of different linguistic levels

Abstract We investigate the interrelations between pronunciation and writing skills in French as a foreign language produced by two groups of bilingual learners (German-Russian; German-Turkish) and a monolingually raised German control group (each n = 10). As an indicator of the learners’ pronunciation skills, we refer to a perceptually relevant acoustic feature of stop production, “Voice Onset Time” (VOT). Our aim is to explore whether the learners’ proficiency at the level of pronunciation is mirrored in (1) their global language competencies and (2) their writing skills. We applied an extreme-cases approach based on the learners’ VOT productions in L3 French. Both positive and negative d…