This study analyzed the production and perception of Portuguese and English voiceless stops by twelve heritage learners of European Portuguese. Data were collected through two pseudoword reading tasks, a cross-linguistic rated dissimilarity task, and a cross-language perceptual assimilation task. The results show that Canadian English–European Portuguese bilinguals did not perceptually distinguish between aspirated and plain voiceless stops. However, the acoustic analysis revealed that they produced a significant language-specific difference between English aspirated and Portuguese unaspirated voiceless stops. Individual variation was observed in the categorization and production of heritage Portuguese plain stops and correlated with language use and perceived accent ratings.

This study investigates the effect of changes in voice onset time (VOT) on heritage speakers’ perception of Korean intervocalic stops (i.e., /p, t, k/), and compares their results to those of Korean monolinguals and second language (L2) learners of Korean who are L1 speakers of American English or Mandarin Chinese. A discrimination task using five synthetic /C1V1C2V2/ stimuli that differed in VOT of C2 was created to test inter-group differences. While the L2 learners display categorical awareness of VOT variation, Korean and heritage speakers perceive the two consonants to be the same for most stimuli regardless of VOT values. This unexpected lack of attention to VOT variation among heritage speakers suggests that they may switch their language mode to Korean and activate Korean phonology in discriminating non-phonemic VOT differences. However, their responses are not uniform or robust, with some showing a pattern similar to that of L2 learners, revealing strong individual differences among heritage speakers.