In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utterances is not totally foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite different function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance-final intonational phrases, where a pronounced tendency for down-stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from Italian. As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.

Models such as Eckman's markedness differential hypothesis, Flege's speech learning model, and Brown's feature-based theory of perception seek to explain and predict the relative difficulty second language (L2) learners face when acquiring new or similar sounds. In this paper, we test their predictive adequacy as concerns native English speakers' mastery of French /Â/ and Spanish /|/. Based on an acoustic analysis of the learner data, we demonstrate that these three models do not account for the full range of variability nor for the developmental sequences attested, because they do not consider the degree of difficulty involved in the simultaneous mastery of multiple phonetic parameters across prosodic positions. Consequently, models of L2 phonological acquisition must not only integrate findings from markedness theory and speech perception but also incorporate phonetic constraints on production.One of the central goals of research on second language (L2) phonological acquisition is to model interlanguage development. This includes not only describing but importantly also explaining and predicting the relative difficulty learners of a given first language face when acquiring segments absent from or similar to those of their first language (L1). To date, most research in this vein has focused on intralinguistic difficulty, that is, the relative challenge of acquiring two or more new phonological structures in a given target language (TL), particularly sounds involved in an opposition (e.g., English /l/ and /®/, e.g., Larson-Hall, 2004; voiceless vs. voiced coda obstruents, e.g., Hancin-Bhatt, 2000). These accounts have made their predictions based principally on typological markedness (

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We compare the extent to which Spanish heritage speakers and long-term immigrants in the United States differ in their intonation of broad focus declaratives, and propose that the between-group variability is motivated by the specific language learning/literacy conditions of each group. Results from a phonetically balanced reading task and an elicited narrative revealed significant differences between the two groups in their realization of pitch accents in read speech but not in the narratives. These results suggest that less-controlled tasks are more representative of the bilingual status of adult bilinguals, and that metalinguistic tasks, such as reading aloud, should be implemented with caution, crucially among Spanish heritage speakers who are in a semi-diglossic situation in the United States.