Accommodation and Language Contact.

The paper introduces the Special Issue on , which originates from the conference Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) held at the University of Lecce, Italy, in 2019. It discusses the topics of language contact and speaker accommodation, summarizing the contributions included in the Special Issue, and arguing explicitly in favour of a unitary view of how both temporary and stable changes happen in (part of) the linguistic systems. Accommodation is seen as the same gradual and non-homogeneous process at play in different contact settings.

Assimilation of L2 vowels to L1 phonemes governs L2 learning in adulthood: a behavioral and ERP study.

According to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), articulatory similarity/dissimilarity between sounds of the second language (L2) and the native language (L1) governs L2 learnability in adulthood and predicts L2 sound perception by naïve listeners. We performed behavioral and neurophysiological experiments on two groups of university students at the first and fifth years of the English language curriculum and on a group of naïve listeners. Categorization and discrimination tests, as well as the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response to L2 sound changes, showed that the discriminatory capabilities of the students did not significantly differ from those of the naïve subjects.

Numerical instabilities and three-dimensional electromagnetic articulography.

The AG500 electromagnetic articulograph is widely used to reconstruct the movements of the articulatory organs. Nevertheless, some anomalies in its performance have been observed. It is well known that accuracy of the device is affected by electromagnetic interference and possible hardware failures or damage to the sensors.

Pitch accent alignment in romance: primary and secondary associations with metrical structure.

The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for such facts within the AM model, the article develops the notion of "phonological anchoring" as an extension of the concept of secondary association originally proposed by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), and later adopted by Grice (1995), Grice, Ladd, and Arvaniti (2000), and others to explain the behavior of edge tones.