University of Arizona

Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés (2003) and Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch (2009) showed an intriguing pattern in the vowel acquisition of simultaneous Catalan-Spanish bilinguals. Specifically, while 4and 12-month-old bilinguals could distinguish between the phonemes /e/ and /ɛ/ in a familiarization-preference task, the 8-month-olds could not. The same pattern held for the contrast between /o/ and /u/. In contrast, Catalan monolinguals maintained the ability to discriminate the contrasts throughout the first year. These results were originally taken to indicate a lack of bilingual discriminatory abilities between these vowel pairs at eight months. However, Albareda-Castellot et al. (2011) showed that when the bilingual infants are given a task with more "direction", they succeed at eight months. This then presents an interesting story: Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants are simultaneously able and unable to distinguish between certain vowel pairs at eight months. I computationally explore some of the likely factors involved in producing this pattern in bilinguals and conclude that the pattern is possible to produce in a lexically-based phoneme acquisition system with a high number of cognates.