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The Imitation Of Ecuadorian Assibilated Rhotics By Naïve Andalusian Speakers From Seville, Maria De La Esperanza Ruiz-Peña

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of the present thesis is to establish whether Flege’s “equivalence classification” (Flege, 1995, p. 239) operates in the same way in auditory imitation of an unfamiliar dialect as it does in second language (L2) acquisition of speech. In order to do so, this study investigates how Andalusian Spanish speakers imitate assibilated rhotics produced in Ecuadorian Spanish. Despite substantial growth in interest in D2 phonological acquisition in later years (e.g., Babel, 2009; Nielsen, 2011), little research has been done to determine whether the mechanisms that underlie the production of L2 are also responsible for the auditory imitation of an …