The production of Spanish vowels by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2015/06/0012/000249Keywords:
Spanish-English bilingual, Spanish vowel, acoustic analysis, attritionAbstract
We examine the production of the Spanish vowels [a, e, i] by two groups of Spanish–English bilinguals plus a control group from the same dialectal area. The bilinguals differed in their age of onset of acquisition of English: the early bilinguals acquired English before puberty and the late bilinguals after puberty. Participants read a list of words containing the target sounds controlled by position, stress and phonetic context. Formant values ($F_1$ and $F_2$) were measured at 3 points in each vowel to investigate diphthongization. We hypothesized that early bilinguals’ production of vowels would exhibit (i) fronting, (ii) diphthongization and (iii) reduction, following the English norm. Hypotheses (i) and (ii) were confirmed. We discuss the influence of age of arrival on bilinguals’ performance.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
