There is an old anecdote about Daniel Jones (the real Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady/Pygmalion) according to which all he needed was “his ears” for phonetics fieldwork. Currently, many linguists do not receive enough phonetic training and consequently may not have Jones’ acoustically tuned… read more
With the aim of uncovering the dynamics of cross-linguistic influence (CLI), the present study investigates the production of word-initial stops by L1 Mandarin-L2 English bilinguals learning L3 Spanish over the course of a semester. For this purpose, six Spanish majors at a university in… read more
This paper examines the emergence and gradual spreading of syllable structures in Spanish from the perspective of Optimality Theory. Data from five children of the CHILDES project is analyzed and it is found that the different syllabic structures emerge in a consistent pattern that describes four… read more