COMPENSATORY LENGTHENING IN BILINGUAL ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGES INSENSITIVE TO SYLLABLE WEIGHT LAETITIA ALMEIDA 1. Introduction The compensatory lengthening pattern when a Coda consonant is deleted in languages insensitive to syllable weight has received very little attention. All of the available data comes from impressionistic transcription-based studies. This paper provides new acoustical evidence. It focuses on the effects of compensatory lengthening within the rhyme, at the stage when target Coda consonants are not yet produced by two bilingual children simultaneously acquiring European French and Portuguese 1 . Within Moraic Theory, it is generally assumed that short vowels are associated to one mora, while long vowels and diphthongs are associated to two moras. A Coda consonant can be associated to one mora in some languages, this assignment being language-specific. It has been described that, in different contexts, the deletion of a Coda consonant generates the lengthening of the preceding vowel in order to maintain the mora of the deleted Coda consonant (Hayes, 1989). French and Portuguese are generally not considered to be sensitive to syllable weight: such languages typically have contrast between long and short vowels, a contrast that French and Portuguese do not display. According to Dell (1995), in French, a rhyme is maximally bipositional: only one consonant is allowed in Coda position but there is no restriction on which consonant can fill this position. In Portuguese, Mateus & Andradre (2000) also describe the rhyme as maximally bipositional, with only one consonant being allowed in Coda position. Only three segments can fill the Coda position in Portuguese: the fricative [s], the tap [ɾ] and the lateral [l]. The nucleus can branch into a falling diphthong and, in these cases, only the fricative consonant is allowed in Coda position.