Abstract. This study investigates the perception of Welsh vowel contrasts by WelshSpanish bilinguals. A two-alternative forced choice perception task elicited subjects' reliance on vowel tenseness and duration in the identification of ambiguous Welsh vowels. Results demonstrate no effect of order of acquisition on speakers' reliance on duration (over vowel quality) as a cue to vowel identity in Welsh. This supports past work demonstrating that speakers of a language which lacks a given contrast perceptually rely on the most salient phonetic dimension of that contrast in an L2. Results were also atypical: language dominance outweighed a predicted age of acquisition effect on speakers adaptation to L2 phonetic cues.

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is one of two main dialect families of Welsh (cym, ISO 693-3) spoken in Wales, the other being Southern Welsh. The Welsh counties of Anglesey, Gwynedd, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, and Wrexham in the United Kingdom are considered to comprise the unofficial region of North Wales shown in Figure 1 (as designated by StatsWales 2018). Within this area there are further dialectal differences that are beyond the scope of this analysis, which considers the general features of Northern Welsh as a whole. However, see Thomas & Thomas (1989) for an overview of differences between eastern and western varieties of Northern Welsh.Welsh is a Brittonic Celtic language, more closely related to Cornish and Breton than to Celtic languages in the Goidelic branch: Manx, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic (Ball & Fife 1993). Like all Celtic languages, Welsh has verb-initial word order and a system of initial consonant mutation. Initial consonant mutation is the remnant of historic sandhi processes which conditioned predictable phonological alternations. Today, the phonological triggers for these alternations are opaque or absent, and mutation is best described as a morphophonological process that is found in a small set of lexical items and syntactic patterns (see section 'Mutation' below for further detail).Phonetic description of Welsh has a long history, notably Sweet (1882) and S. Jones (1926). More recent work includes a description of the vocalic system (G. E. Jones 1971(G. E. Jones , 1972, a description of Welsh stress (B. Williams 1999), a collected volume reporting a

Abstract. Listeners integrate a wide variety of cues when categorizing speech sounds, including lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information. We investigate the influence of Initial Consonant Mutation, a morphosyntacticallytriggered alternation in the modern Celtic languages, on the categorical perception of stop voicing in Welsh. Once sandhi processes, Celtic mutations are now lexically and morphosyntactically triggered; in particular, Welsh Soft Mutation causes wordinitial voiceless stops to become voiced when they are preceded by a triggering word or construction. This paper reports the results of a two-alternative forced choice task that tests the hypothesis that Welsh listeners integrate their knowledge of mutationtriggering environments during speech perception, accepting more ambiguous segments as voiced when preceded by a Soft-Mutation-triggering word relative to a non-triggering word. While the results of the experiment demonstrate categorical perception of stop voicing, no robust effect of mutation environment was found. Several hypotheses as to why the predicted result was not found are considered.

In this paper we investigate category-specific effects through the lens of Welsh mutation. Smith (2011) and Moreton et al. (2017) show that English distinguishes nouns and proper nouns in an experimental blending task. Here we show that Welsh distinguishes nouns, verbs, personal names, and place names in the mutation system. We demonstrate these effects experimentally in a translation task designed to elicit mutation intuitions and in several corpus studies. In addition, we show that these effects correlate with lexical frequency. Deeper statistical analysis and a review of the English data suggests that frequency is a more explanatory factor than part of speech in both languages. We therefore argue that these category-specific effects can be reduced to lexical frequency effects.