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The Aspiration Of The Spanish Grapheme ‘H’, Carolina Gonzalo-Llera

Research and Creative Activities Poster Day

One aspect of Spanish pronunciation that differs from English pronunciation is the phonetic treatment of the letter ‘h’. While this grapheme corresponds to a voiceless glottal fricative [h] in English (also known as “aspirated [h]”), it has no phonetic realization in Spanish. In other words, the letter ‘h’ in Spanish is not pronounced at all or is “silent”. This difference often results in Spanish pronunciation errors by L2 learners of the language. The present study aims to deepen our understanding of the erroneous pronunciation of ‘h’ by exploring how prevalent the error really is in the speech of beginning and …