The present talk focuses on the development of language-specific, phonological processing abilities in L2 and early bilingualism. We test the processing of stress by L2 learners of Spanish whose first language is English, and early English-Spanish bilinguals.
People who speak languages without lexically contrastive stress (e.g., French) exhibit a challenge in the processing of word-level prominence in general (Dupoux et al., 1997; 2001). Stress is contrastive in both Spanish and English, which would suggest that speakers of both these languages are able to process stress with ease (Peperkamp & Dupoux, 2002). Nevertheless, studies looking at second-language learners of Spanish whose native language is English, as well as Spanish-English early bilinguals show that such learners find the identification of Spanish stress in words challenging. It seems that the similarities between Spanish and English stress patterns obscure some crucial dissimilarities that lead to a differential treatment of stress by speakers of these languages (Cutler, 1986; Lin et al., 2014; Soto-Faraco et al., 2001). We hypothesize that exposure to English during the development of phonological parsing abilities leads speakers to not encode stress in their lexicon, which could lead to difficulties when processing Spanish stress—i.e., they must encode a feature in Spanish which they do not encode in English. We approach this by examining the extent (and limits) of efficient phonological encoding (i.e., the encoding of phonological features in working memory) of Spanish stress. We replicated the ABX discrimination task in Dupoux et al. (1997) with 102 participants included in three groups: L2 late learners of Spanish of varying proficiencies, English-Spanish early bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals. The findings are as follows: (1) L2 learners and early bilinguals, but not monolinguals, were challenged by stress-based contrasts; (2) for L2 learners, higher grammatical proficiency correlates with increased accuracy. We conclude that early exposure to Spanish is not sufficient to develop a robust representation of stress in the context of early bilingualism. We also conclude that L2 learners’ stress representation becomes more stable with increased knowledge of Spanish.
