Published in: Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 100, June 2018, 61-88 Abstract “Evidence suggests that speakers hyperarticulate phonetic cues to word identity in a way that increases phonetic distance to similar competitors. However, the degree and type of phonetic similarity between competitors which induces hyperarticulation remains unclear. Here, we compared neighborhood density (as a representative of a phonetically-general type of similarity) to the existence of a phonetic cue-specific lexical minimal pair in terms of their ability to predict hyperarticulation of two different cue-types in a corpus of natural English speech. For all phonetic cues that we investigated – word-initial voiceless… Read More
Individual phonological attrition in Albanian–English late bilinguals
Published in: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Volume 21, Issue 2, 278-295 Abstract “The purpose of this study was to investigate phonological attrition in 10 native Albanian speakers who acquired Standard Southern British English (SSBE) as a second language (L2) in London, United Kingdom. A contrast was examined which is phonemic in Albanian but allophonic in SSBE, namely the production of light and dark lateral approximants. Impressionistic and acoustic analyses revealed that one late bilingual completely neutralized the phonemic contrast in her native Albanian speech. Furthermore, two other bilinguals neutralized the phonemic contrast between light /l/ and dark /ɫ/ in coda position,… Read More