No abstract

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish-English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical items with considerable phonological, semantic, and orthographic overlap (cognates) and lexical items with no phonological overlap with their English translation equivalents (non-cognates) were examined. The results indicate that there is a significant effect of cognate status in the Spanish production of VOT by Spanish-English bilinguals. These bilinguals produced /t/ with longer VOT values (more English-like) in the Spanish production of cognates compared to non-cognate words. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001;Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections by which cognates facilitate phonetic interference in the bilingual mental lexicon.

Aims: This study investigates the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts by 54 early Spanish-Galician bilinguals in the cities of Vigo and Santiago (Galicia, Spain). Empirical data is provided to examine the role of language dominance in the perception and production of Galician mid vowel contrasts in order to determine whether the Galician vowel system is becoming more Spanish-like as a result of extensive contact with Spanish in urban areas. Methods: Perception and production data for each mid vowel contrast were collected in (1) binary forced-choice identification tasks, (2) AX discrimination tasks and (3) a reading-aloud task. Results: Results from binary forced-choice identification and AX discrimination tasks indicate that Spanish-dominant bilinguals have great difficulty in discriminating between these mid vowels while Galician-dominant subjects display a robust categorical identification of the two mid vowel categories. Acoustic analyses of their productions show that Galician-dominant bilinguals implement a Galician-specific /e/-/ɛ/ contrast but Spanish-dominant ones produce a single, merged Spanish-like front mid vowel. However, both language dominance groups seem to maintain a more robust /o/-/ɔ/ contrast. This asymmetry between front and back mid vowels is found in the productions of both language dominance groups. Conclusion: These results show that language dominance is a strong predictor of the production and perception abilities of Spanish-Galician bilinguals, and that only Galician-dominant subjects in these urban areas possess two independent phonetic categories in the front and back mid vowel space.

This study examines the perception and processing of the Catalan /e/-/ɛ/ and /o/-/ɔ/ vowel contrasts by 60 Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Results from binary forced-choice identification, AX discrimination, and lexical decision tasks show that even though these early and highly proficient bilinguals demonstrate a high accuracy in perceptual identification and discrimination tasks, they have difficulties distinguishing between words and nonwords in a lexical decision task. Spanish dominants also exhibited higher error rates than Catalan dominants in the lexical decision task. These findings provide evidence that making explicit judgments regarding whether a certain sound belongs to a phonemic category (i.e., as accomplished via identification and discrimination tasks) does not entail that listeners have an appropriate representation at the lexical level.

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study investigates the perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts by 60 early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals addressing the following questions: (1) what are the effects of language dominance in the production and perception of the Catalan midvowels? (2) Does the perceptual deficit attributed in Barcelona remain in Majorca? (3) Do these bilinguals maintain the mid-vowel contrasts in production? And (4) what is the relationship between the perception and production of the mid-vowel contrasts within each bilingual individual? Design/Methodology/Approach: Participants completed categorical AXB discrimination and picture-naming tasks to examine their perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts. Data and Analysis: The perception data consisted of 8,640 responses and the production dataset comprised 9,585 acoustic measurements that were submitted to mixed-model ANOVAs. Individual variation was explored by calculating the Euclidean distance between the mid-vowel categories for each speaker and exploring correlations with their accuracy rates in the perception task. Findings/Conclusions: The results indicate that mid-vowels are more susceptible to discrimination difficulties than other vowel contrasts. Even though these bilinguals overall maintain robust midvowel contrasts in their productions, a closer examination reveals that the degree of language dominance affects the acoustic distance maintained between the mid-vowel targets. Individuals that produced the mid-vowels with smaller Euclidean distances were more likely to have a higher error rate in the perception task than bilinguals who produced a more robust contrast. Originality: This study examines both mid-vowel contrasts in a variety of Catalan that has been reported to maintain robust mid-vowel contrasts in comparison to the acquisition deficit described in Barcelona, and explores the relationship between the production and perception abilities of each bilingual individual along a continuum of language dominance. Significance/Implications: This study contributes with new data to the study of language dominance and the relationship between the production and perception abilities of early and highly proficient bilinguals.