Hispanic Linguistics PhD student Farrah Neumann recently made a presentation on her research at the May conference of the Acoustical Society of America. She found that found that students whose first language was English and who were studying abroad in Spain experienced changes to their English phonological representations by the end of four weeks of Spanish immersion. This backwards transfer was evidenced by learners' increased sensitivity to priming by Spanish phonological patterns, even when the primes provided misleading input (i.e. minimal pairs) in the first language.
Farrah also reports that she and Dr. Matt Kanwit recently had a paper published in Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics. The article is titled "New perspectives on automatic and morphophonological alternations: Harmonic Processes in two Peninsular varieties of Spanish."