Like in perception tasks, neofalantes behaved more similarly to Spanish-dominant listeners. Results showed that recognition was slower for Spanish-dominants, however, the level of lexical activation of the confusable competitors was similar for Galician- and Spanish-dominant groups. Study 3 used eye-tracking to investigate the effects of language dominance and long-term language switch on spoken word recognition. Instead, neofalantes were categorised as both Galician- and Spanish-dominant speakers. However, Study 2 demonstrated that these shifts in production were not sufficient to enable Galician listeners to identify the neofalantes’ accent as a distinctive variety. Results showed that neofalantes pattern with Spanish-dominants in their perception and production of mid-vowel and fricative contrasts, but with Galician-dominants in their realisation of unstressed word-final vowels, a highly salient feature of Galician. Change was inferred by comparing this group to two control groups, Galician-dominant and Spanish-dominant bilinguals. Study 1 examined whether neofalantes changed aspects of their production and perception of Galician post-switch. Galician ‘new speakers’ (neofalantes) are unbalanced bilinguals raised with Spanish as a primary language, who learn Galician at an early age in a bilingual environment, but in adolescence, decide to switch to using Galician almost exclusively, for ideological reasons. This thesis contributes to our understanding of this question by investigating bilingual speech development in a naturalistic setting. It has long been debated whether speech processing remains flexible in adulthood. Another important finding is that, although the late learners generally perceived English vowels less accurately than the early learners, some perceived them accurately. These results suggest two important conclusions regarding second language (L2) perceptual learning: Learning an L2 in childhood does not guarantee a nativelike perception of L2 vowels, nor does the establishment of a sound system for the L1 preclude a functionally nativelike perception of L2 vowels. Most important, the early learners who used Italian often (early high), but not the early learners who used Italian seldom (early low), were found to differ from native speakers of English in perceiving English vowels.
In both experiments, the early learners obtained higher discrimination scores than the late learners, and low-L1-use participants obtained higher scores than high-L1-use participants. Experiment 3 focused on the discrimination of /D/-/Lambda/, /epsilon/-/ae/, and /i/-/I/, and experiment 4 examined the discrimination of correct from incorrect realizations of /I/ and /i/. late) and percentage of first language (L1) use (high L1 use vs. The participants in two other experiments, long-time residents of Canada, were assigned to groups based on their age of arrival in Canada from Italy (early vs. In two preliminary experiments, Italian university students who had lived in Canada for 3 months were found to have difficulty discriminating /D/-/Lambda/, /epsilon/-/ae/, and /i/-/I/ because they often identified both members of each contrast as instances of a single Italian vowel. This study examines the perception of English vowels by native speakers of Italian.
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