Research on the effects on early bilingualism on reading development is scarce. Here, we tackle this question by investigating whether the exposure to dual-language contexts (use of two languages in the same conversational situation) induces a boost in phonological and reading performance through more balanced spatial auditory attentional skills.…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and epilepsy represent a comorbidity that negatively influences the proper development of linguistic competencies, particularly in receptive language, in the pediatric population. This group displays impairments in the auditory comprehension of both simple and complex grammatical structures, significantly limiting…

In this paper, I first provide a brief review of how scholars have conceptualized, tested, and elaborated aptitude frameworks relevant to second language (L2) speech learning. Subsequently, I introduce an emerging paradigm that assigns a fundamental role to domain-general auditory processing (i.e., having a good ear) in L1 speech acquisition and…

In two artificial language learning experiments with four groups of highly proficient Basque-Spanish bilinguals and two groups of Spanish monolinguals, we examine the cues that allow adult listeners to parse new input into phrases. In addition, we investigate which factors lead bilinguals to switch between the segmentation strategies…

Factors that affect comprehension of accented English (e.g., Harding, 2011) have been well studied, but little research examines how listeners' proficiency affects their sensitivity to second language (L2) accent. The current study investigated the effect of test takers' English proficiency on their comprehension ratings and ability to correctly…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where…