ABSTRACT
Research in the area of bilingual speech production and perception has a long history dating back decades, in which researchers have established that bilingual speakers’ past experiences with their languages, including age of acquisition of one or both languages, age of arrival to the country of immigration, and types of exposure to and usage of the first (L1) and second (L2) language, have a significant impact on shaping their phonetic and phonological systems (see Flege 1995; Flege & Eefting 1988, among many others). Until recently, however, very little work has directly examined the phonetic and phonological systems of heritage speakers, and more specifically, heritage speakers of Spanish (hereafter HSS) as they have been linguistically and culturally defined (see Potowski, this volume). The goal of the present chapter is to review investigations that examine the phonological production and perceptual patterns of HSS who were either born in the U.S. or moved here prior to the age of 6 and have experienced and continue to experience contact between Spanish and English.
