ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Bilingualism
Acquisition and attrition in bilingual vowel systems: Evidence from Arabic and English
Provisionally accepted
- 1Umm Al-Qura University, Mecca, Saudi Arabia
- 2University of Graz, Graz, Austria
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This study examined how long-term immersion in a second language (L2) affects the acquisition and maintenance of long vowels in bilinguals whose first language (L1) is Arabic or English. Focusing on Arabic /aː/, /iː/, /uː/, and English /ɑː/, /iː/, /uː/, we compared vowel productions by highly proficient Arabic-English and English-Arabic late bilinguals with those of monolingual controls. The study investigated whether bilinguals produce nativelike vowels in their L1 and their L2, whether sound discrimination aptitude predicts vowel production accuracy, and to what extent L2 acquisition and L1 attrition are interrelated. Vowel productions were analyzed in terms of vowel height (F1) and vowel frontness (F2), using linear mixed-effects models and correlation analyses. Results revealed distinct patterns across vowels: Both bilingual groups produced nativelike /aː/-/ɑː/, reflecting successful L2 acquisition and stable L1 maintenance. In contrast, /iː/ and /uː/ displayed cross-linguistic influences: Arabic /iː/ was affected by L1 attrition, while /uː/ revealed both nonnative L2 and modified L1 realizations. A positive link emerged between L2 and L1 nativelikeness for /uː/, suggesting parallel proficiency (i.e., successful acquisition and L1 maintenance) across languages. Sound discrimination aptitude had little effect. Overall, our findings support dynamic models of bilingual speech production, such as the revised Speech Learning Model, by demonstrating that L1 and L2 categories remain interdependent and that individual and contextual factors influence the phonetic stability of bilingual speech.
Keywords: Arabic, english, First language attrition, Long vowels, Second Language Acquisition, sound discrimination aptitude
Received: 03 Nov 2025; Accepted: 19 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Alharbi, Kornder and Foltz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lisa Kornder
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