This study investigates perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel /e/-/ɛ/ contrast by two groups of 4.5-year-old Catalan–Spanish bilingual children, differing in language dominance. Perception was assessed with an XAB discrimination task involving familiar words and non-words. Production accuracy was measured using a familiar-word elicitation task. Overall, Catalan-dominant bilingual children outperformed Spanish-dominant bilinguals, the latter showing high variability in production accuracy, while being slightly above chance level in perception. No correlation between perception and production performance could be established in this group. The effect of language dominance alone could not explain the Spanish-dominant participants’ performance, but quality of Catalan input (native vs. accented speech) was identified as an important factor behind familiar-word production and the inaccurate representation of the target contrast in the lexicon of the bilinguals’ less-dominant language. More fine-grained measurements of experience-related factors are needed for a full understanding of the acquisition of challenging contrasts in bilingual contexts.

本研究调查了两组 4.5 岁的加泰罗尼亚语-西班牙语双语儿童对加泰罗尼亚语中元音 /e/-/ɛ/ 对比的感知和产生，语言优势不同。感知是通过涉及熟悉的单词和非单词的 XAB 辨别任务进行评估的。使用熟悉的单词启发任务测量生产准确性。总体而言，以加泰罗尼亚语为主的双语儿童的表现优于以西班牙语为主的双语儿童，后者在生产准确性方面表现出高度可变性，同时在感知方面略高于机会水平。无法在该组中建立感知和生产性能之间的相关性。仅靠语言优势的影响无法解释以西班牙语为主的参与者的表现，但可以解释加泰罗尼亚语输入的质量（母语与英语）。带口音的语音）被认为是熟悉的单词产生背后的一个重要因素，以及双语者不太占主导地位的语言的词典中目标对比的不准确表示。需要对与经验相关的因素进行更细粒度的测量，以全面了解双语环境中具有挑战性的对比的获得。