Online First March 10, 2016.Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken
words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal
variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second
language (L2) accented speech and where accommodation to dialectal variation takes place. Dialectal
effects were analyzed at different levels: An AXB discrimination task tapped phonetic-phonological
representations, an auditory lexical-decision task tested for effects in accessing the lexicon, and an
auditory priming task looked for semantic processing effects. Within that central focus, the goal was to
see whether perceptual adjustment at a given level is affected by 2 main linguistic factors: bilinguals’ first
language and age of acquisition of the L2. Taking advantage of the cross-linguistic situation of the
Basque language, bilinguals with different first languages (Spanish or French) and ages of acquisition of
Basque (simultaneous, early, or late) were tested. Our use of multiple tasks with multiple types of
bilinguals demonstrates that in spite of very similar discrimination capacity, French-Basque versus
Spanish-Basque simultaneous bilinguals’ performance on lexical access significantly differed. Similarly,
results of the early and late groups show that the mapping of phonetic-phonological information onto
lexical representations is a more demanding process that accentuates non-native processing difficulties.
L1 and AoA effects were more readily overcome in semantic processing; accented variants regularly
created priming effects in the different groups of bilinguals.This study was conducted with the support of the PSI 2010–17781 Grant
to the second author from the Spanish Government (MINECO)
