Acquisition in a Multilingual Context: English Mid and Low Vowel Contrasts by Native Speakers of Tashlhit

Tashlhit learners of English learn English in a multilingual context where Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, French as well as other Amazigh dialects are spoken. Perception and production experiments show that in the acquisition of mid and low vowels of English, contrasts are acoustically assimilated into composite vowels that differ both from the L1 and the other languages in the multilingual linguistic repertoires of speakers. This happens although the target mid vowels are present as allophones in MA and MSA and as phonemes in French. It is argued that the prevalence of three-vowel systems in this context has a confounding effect on the acquisition of new contrasts.