The present paper provides a grammatical description of Chota Valley Spanish (CVS), an Afro-Hispanic dialect spoken in the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi, Northern Ecuador. It builds on previous dialectological analyses (Lipski 1982, 1986, 1987, 2008, 2010; Schwegler 1999) and complements them with new linguistic data. In doing so, this study also wants to stress the importance of conducting further research on Afro-Hispanic dialects since their grammars, origins, and evolutions are still for the most part under-studied.

This paper focuses on various peculiarities of the dialectal variety spoken in the region of Conflent (Northern Catalonia, France) that has not been really studied up to this moment. The data provided shed some evidence of the closeness of this dialectal Catalan to Occitan and reinforces Coromines' hypothesis that Northern Catalan had a physionomy closer to Occitan during the Middle Ages.

A theoretical analysis of synchronic /e/ prosthesis in non-native wordinitial /sC/ sequences in Spanish is provided. In light of new evidence, it is argued that the appearance of the word-initial /e/ to the left margin of the non-native /sC/ onset is a perception-based phenomenon, and not triggered directly as a productive operation of the grammar. This assertion is robustly supported by the results of a series of perception tests involving 50 Spanish-speaking children in which the subjects routinely reported hearing an illusory vowel to the left of the non-native complex onset. These data are in line with past accounts of perceptual epenthesis and suggest that the auditory signal in some instances may be distorted by a high-level bias for native sound patterns. At the time of production, then this means that the dominant grammatical constraint governing the appearance of /e/ is based on principles of input/output correspondence, and not productive constraints referencing structural phonotactics.