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The Production Of Mexican Rhotics By Haitian Creole Speakers In Tijuana Mexico: A Sociophonetic Approach, Natasha A. Swiderski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study investigates the production of the Spanish /ɾ-r/ (e.g., [ˈpɛ.ɾo] ‘but’ vs. [ˈpɛ.ro] 'dog') contrast by 30 multi-lingual Haitian Creole speakers learning Spanish, living in Tijuana, Mexico. Specifically, it (a) tests the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) regarding the ease of acquisition of 'new sounds' (i.e. the Spanish rhotics), (b) examines the effect of orthography and (c) investigates the role of social factors, namely language attitude and education on the production of the Spanish rhotics. An acoustic analysis of 2396 tokens show that despite Flege's predictions, the [r] and the [ɾ] are difficult for the learners to produce, albeit …