Purpose: This study focuses on stop voicing differentiation in bilingual children with normal hearing (NH) and their bilingual peers with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Twenty-two bilingual children participated in our study (11 with NH, M age = 5;1 [years;months], and 11 with CIs, M hearing age = 5;1). The groups were matched on hearing age and a range of demographic variables. Single-word picture elicitation was used with word-initial singleton stop consonants. Repeated measures analyses of variance with three within-subject factors (language, stop voicing, and stop place of articulation) and one between-subjects factor (NH vs. CI user) were conducted with voice onset time and percentage of prevoiced stops as dependent variables. Results: Main effects were statistically significant for language, stop voicing, and stop place of articulation on both voice onset time and prevoicing. There were no significant main effects for NH versus CI groups. Both children with NH and with CIs differentiated stop voicing in their languages and by stop place of articulation. Stop voicing differentiation was commensurate across the groups of children with NH versus CIs. Conclusions: Stop voicing differentiation is accomplished in a similar fashion by bilingual children with NH and CIs, and both groups differentiate stop voicing in a languagespecific fashion.

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Nasality, whether part of a consonant or vowel, has certain phonetic and phonological characteristics that lead to outcomes seen time and again in languages with and without common ancestries. Spanish and Portuguese constitute a particularly fruitful language pairing for studying phonological aspects of synchronic and diachronic variation, given their intimate relationship as well as the array of dialectal variation in each. This research monograph offers a comprehensive exploration of nasals and nasalization in Spanish and Portuguese with a special focus on the role of perception in order to provide insight into how perception informs models of phonetics, phonology and language change. Of interest to researchers and advanced students alike, this volume integrates phonetic and phonological models of speech perception and production, and discusses these with regards to original empirical research on the perception of nasal place features and vowel nasalization by listeners of Peninsular Spanish, Cuban Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

Brazilian Portuguese allows only /s, N, l, r/ syllable finally, and of these, only /s/ is realized faithfully (as well as /r/ for some speakers). In order to avoid unacceptable codas, dialects of Brazilian Portuguese employ such strategies as epenthesis, nasal absorption, debucalization, and gliding. The current analysis argues that codas in Brazilian Portuguese become progressively more acceptable according to their sonority, with more sonorous codas suffering less drastic changes in form and syllable structure. Dovetailing principles of optimality theory and sonority sequencing, the current analysis results in a succinct, cohesive account of Brazilian Portuguese codas.

That a listener’s first language affects the perception of a second language is generally undisputed. In addition to linguistic experience, acoustic effects of coarticulation have been shown to influence speech perception [Abramson et al. (1981); Krakow et al. (1988); Mann (1986) and others]. For example, nasalization of vowels has been shown to affect the perception of vowel height due to its spectral consequences in the region associated with vowel height [Beddor and Strange (1982); Krakow et al. (1988); Ohala (1986); Wright (1975)]. While some effects of coarticulation appear to produce the same perceptual shifts crosslinguistically [Mann (1986)], it is not clear that all coarticulatory influences are language independent [Krakow et al. (1988)]. The current study seeks to investigate the relationship between acoustic effects of coarticulation and linguistic experience. Since Portuguese has allophonic and (surface) contrastive nasalization [Wetzels (1997)] and Spanish does not have phonological nasalization in any context [Solé (1992)], adult speakers of these languages were tested, using synthetic stimuli, for perception of contextualized nasal vowels (i.e., nasal vowels adjacent to tautosyllabic nasal consonants) and noncontextualized nasal vowels (i.e., nasal vowels with no adjacent nasal consonant). Results indicate that coarticulatory influences of nasalization are language dependent.