This study investigates the effect of L2 (Spanish) use on Catalan–Spanish bilinguals’ ability to accurately perceive and produce two contrastive native Catalan vowel categories, /e/ and /ε/. Participants were L1 Catalan highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilinguals differing in amount of daily exposure/use of Catalan (low: 40%–70% vs. high: 80%–100%). Perceptual accuracy was assessed through speeded categorization and AXB discrimination tasks based on a 10-step vowel continuum (/e/–/ε/). Production accuracy was assessed by eliciting /ε/ tokens in Catalan cognate and noncognate words. The results indicated that participants using Spanish more frequently discriminated Catalan vowels /e/ and /ε/ less accurately and significantly more slowly and had a more Spanish-like acoustic target in the production of Catalan /ε/, particularly in cognate words. These results are consistent with the view that, in a language contact context, extensive L2 experience affects L1 sound categories.

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This study investigated the role of inhibition in second language (L2) learners' phonological processing. Participants were Spanish learners of L2 English and American learners of L2 Spanish. We measured inhibition through a retrieval-induced inhibition task. Accuracy of phonological representations (perception and production) was This research would not have been possible without the help of many people. We are indebted to Shiri Lev Ari and Sharon Peperkamp (LSCP, Paris) for sharing the E-prime script of the inhibition task with us. We also thank the speakers who recorded the stimuli: Paola Rodrigues, Tanya Flores, Diana Arroyo, Ana Fernandez, Maggie Peters, and Fiona Pannett. We thank Amanda Rabideau (University of Utah), Elena Safronova (Universitat de Barcelona), and Eva Cerviño-Povedano (Universitat de Barcelona) for help with testing and data processing in Bloomington and Barcelona. For their decisive help in making the testing in Seville possible, we thank Marina Barrio Parra and M. Heliodora Cuenca Villarín, as well as Ron Roosevelt (Universidad de Sevilla). For their institutional, financial, and logistical support, we are indebted to Carmen Muñoz (Universitat de Barcelona) and Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (Indiana University, Bloomington). We also thank Stephanie Dickinson from the Indiana University Statistical Consulting Center for her help with statistical analyses. For stimulating discussions, we thank the members of the Second Language Psycholinguistics Laboratory (Indiana University, Bloomington), especially Ryan Lidster and Jeffrey Holliday, and the audience at New Sounds 2013 in Montréal. We also thank Pavel Trofimovich and the Language Learning editorial team and three anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions. We further acknowledge grant support: Grant-in-Aid, Indiana University Bloomington; Grants FFI2013-47616-P (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) and 2014SGR1089 (Generalitat de Catalunya Darcy, Mora, and Daidone Inhibitory Control and L2 Phonology assessed through a speeded ABX categorization task and a delayed sentence repetition task. We used a measure of L2 vocabulary size to tease out L2 proficiency effects. Higher inhibitory control was related to lower error rate in segmental perception. Inhibition was also related to consonant but not to vowel production accuracy. These results suggest a potential role for inhibition in L2 phonological acquisition, with inhibition enhancing the processing of phonologically relevant acoustic information in the L2 input, which in turn might lead to more accurate L2 phonological representations.

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