This dissertation analyzes the production and perception of lexical stress in trilinguals' first, second, and third languages (L1, L2, and L3) to evaluate how the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis applies to L3 acquisition. According to this hypothesis, acoustic cues to stress have different weights across languages, and results from both…

We assessed the effect of bilingualism on metacognitive processing in the artificial language learning task, in 2 experiments varying in the difficulty to segment the language. Following a study phase in which participants were exposed to the artificial language, segmentation performance was assessed by means of a dual forced-choice recognition…

Vowels with extreme articulatory-acoustic properties act as natural referents. Infant perceptual asymmetries point to an underlying bias favoring these referent vowels. However, as language experience is gathered, distributional frequency of speech sounds could modify this initial bias. The perception of the /i/-/e/ contrast was explored in 144…

A shift from language-general to language-specific sound discrimination abilities has been largely attested in different populations of infants during the second half of the first year of life; however, data are still scarce regarding bilingual populations. Previous research with 4-, 8- and 12-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants had…

Toddlers' and preschoolers' knowledge of the phonological forms of words was tested in Spanish-learning, Catalan-learning, and bilingual children. These populations are of particular interest because of differences in the Spanish and Catalan vowel systems: Catalan has two vowels in a phonetic region where Spanish has only one. The proximity of the…

This text is designed for native speakers of American English who have a good command of Spanish and want to acquire a knowledge of Portuguese. The manual focuses on features of Portuguese pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary that have similar but not always identical counterparts in Spanish. Correspondences which often create interference for…

Two questions are central to the controversy in phonological theory: (1) are there empirical differences between morphophonemic alterations and allophonic variation, and (2) what are the universal constraints on the ordering of phonological processes within the phonological rule component. This paper illustrates a Natural Generative Phonology…