Marta Ramon-Casas

Minimal-pair word learning by bilingual toddlers: the Catalan /e/-/ɛ/ contrast revisited

Twelve-month-old bilingual and monolingual infants show comparable phonetic discrimination skills for vowels belonging to their native language/s. However, Catalan–Spanish bilingual toddlers, but not Catalan monolinguals, appear insensitive to a vowel mispronunciation in familiar words involving the Catalan–Specific /e/-/ɛ/ contrast. Here bilingual and monolingual toddlers were tested in a challenging minimal-pair word learning task involving that contrast (i.e., [bepi]-[bɛpi]). Both groups succeeded, suggesting that bilinguals can successfully use their phonetic categories to phonologically encode novel words. It is argued that bilinguals’ impoverished vowel representations in familiar words might be the result of experiential input factors (e.g., cognate words and mispronunciations due to accented speech).

Phonetic variability in bilinguals’ acquisition of native‐vowel category contrasts.

Previous research has shown that bilingual infants and toddlers follow a slightly different developmental pattern in building and stabilizing some native vowel contrastive categories, compared to monolingual populations. Once in the lexical stage, bilingual toddlers do not always show the expected mispronunciation effect when presented with familiar words in which a vowel change has been introduced. To better understand bilinguals’ protracted process in setting the boundaries for certain, perceptually close, native vowel categories, a phonetic analysis of the input characteristics was undertaken. Speech samples containing target words with Catalan midfront vowel sounds were recorded from two groups of Catalan‐speaking mothers from monolingual and bilingual environments, differing in the use of their L2 (Spanish). First and second formant values of the target vowels were obtained and compared between groups. The vowels were always correctly and contrastively produced, but bilinguals’ formant values differe...