Stress-Induced Acoustic Variation in L2 and L1 Spanish Vowels

A Phonetic Account of Spanish-English Bilinguals’ Divergence with Agreement

Does bilingual language influence in the domain of phonetics impact the morphosyntactic domain? Spanish gender is encoded by word-final, unstressed vowels (/a e o/), which may diphthongize in word-boundary vowel sequences. English neutralizes unstressed final vowels and separates across-word vocalic sequences. The realization of gender vowels as schwa, due to cross-linguistic influence, may remain undetected if not directly analyzed. To explore the potential over-reporting of gender accuracy, we conducted parallel phonetic and morphosyntactic analyses of read and semi-spontaneous speech produced by 11 Monolingual speakers and 13 Early and 13 Late Spanish-English bilinguals. F1 and F2 values were extracted at five points for all word-final unstressed vowels and vowel sequences. All determiner phrases (DPs) from narratives were coded for morphological and contextual parameters. Early bilinguals exhibited clear patterns of vowel centralization and higher rates of hiatuses than the other groups. However, the morphological analysis yielded very few errors. A follow-up integrated analysis revealed that /a and o/ were realized as centralized vowels, particularly with [+Animate] nouns. We propose that bilinguals’ schwa-like realizations can be over-interpreted as target Spanish vowels. Such variable vowel realization may be a factor in the vulnerability to attrition in gender marking in Spanish as a heritage language.

Vowel-to-Vowel Coarticulation in Spanish Nonwords

The present study examined vowel-to-vowel (VV) coarticulation in backness affecting mid vowels /e/ and /o/ in 36 Spanish nonwords produced by 20 native speakers of Spanish, aged 19-50 years (mean = 30.7; SD = 8.2). Examination of second formant frequency showed substantial carryover coarticulation throughout the data set, while anticipatory coarticulation was minimal and of shorter duration. Furthermore, the effect of stress on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation was investigated and found to vary by direction. In the anticipatory direction, small coarticulatory changes were relatively stable regardless of stress, particularly for target /e/, while in the carryover direction, a hierarchy of stress emerged wherein the greatest coarticulation occurred between stressed triggers and unstressed targets, less coarticulation was observed between unstressed triggers and unstressed targets, and the least coarticulation occurred between unstressed triggers with stressed targets. The results of the study augment and refine previously available knowledge about vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Spanish and expand cross-linguistic understanding of the effect of stress on the magnitude and direction of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation.