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Two perceptual tests, designed to investigate the discrimination of the singleton/geminate consonant contrast, were submitted to bilingual English—Lucchese immigrants in the USA, and monolingual Lucchese subjects. The study has two major goals. The first goal is to add a much-needed empirical contribution to the incredibly sparse literature on phonological/phonetic attrition in bilinguals. The second goal is to cast the analysis of phonological attrition for socio-linguistic reasons on a more general psycholinguistic framework for cross-language speech perception. As will be shown, the comparison between the performances of different groups of speakers in different perceptual tasks allowed us to verify that phonological attrition moves along patterns of perceptual sensitivity which can be fruitfully compared with those surfacing in L1/L2 phonological acquisition.
