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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Coarticulation In Two Fricative-Vowel Sequences Of Latin American Spanish, Jeff Renaud
Coarticulation In Two Fricative-Vowel Sequences Of Latin American Spanish, Jeff Renaud
Celebration of Learning
Dialectal surveys of Latin American Spanish (Perissinotto 1975, Resnick 1975) describe three main possible pronunciations for fu (fuego 'fire') and fo (foco 'focus') sequences: faithful [f], velarized [x], and bilabialized [ɸ], in order of frequency. While the velar realization has received phonetic and theoretical consideration (Lipski 1995, Mazzaro 2011), little is understood about the voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ] in Spanish. This paper describes a three-part production study to uniformly account for the unfaithful velar and bilabial realizations.
Mazzaro (2011) explains the velar [x] variant by arguing that, given the acoustic similarity of, e.g., [fu]/[xu], listeners misperceive a speaker's …
El Andaluz Y El Español Estadounidense: Exploring Traces Of Andalusian Sibilants In U.S. Spanish, Carolyn M. Siegman
El Andaluz Y El Español Estadounidense: Exploring Traces Of Andalusian Sibilants In U.S. Spanish, Carolyn M. Siegman
Hispanic Studies Honors Projects
The Andalucista Theory claims that Andalusian Spanish was particularly influential during the development of Spanish in Latin America during the time of Spanish colonization. The present study seeks to examine traces of Andalusian Spanish in Spanish in the United States, considering the added level of complexity brought by contact with English and heightened contact with other dialects of Spanish. By examining 10 interviews from Andalusian Spanish speakers and 12 interviews from Spanish speakers in the U.S., we provide a comparison of the modern-day phonetic realizations of , , and in these two distant linguistic regions.
Sibling Acoustics: Phonetic Measurements Of The Vowels Produced By Three Brothers Who "Sound Alike", Ettien Koffi, James Lyons
Sibling Acoustics: Phonetic Measurements Of The Vowels Produced By Three Brothers Who "Sound Alike", Ettien Koffi, James Lyons
Linguistic Portfolios
This paper seeks to apply an acoustic phonetic methodology to measure and account for the impressionistic assessment of the speech of three brothers whose relatives, friends, and acquaintances say “they sound exactly alike.” The current investigation is limited to the pronunciation of the 11 phonemic monophthong vowels in American English. The psychoacoustic instruments of masking and Just Noticeable Difference (JND) are used to verify if the brothers “sound alike” acoustically. The correlates of the vowels that are investigated in this study are F0, F1, F2, F3, intensity, and duration.
An Exploratory Study Of Heritage Spanish Rhotics: Addressing Methodological Challenges Of Heritage Language Phonetics Research, Elizabeth M. Kissling
An Exploratory Study Of Heritage Spanish Rhotics: Addressing Methodological Challenges Of Heritage Language Phonetics Research, Elizabeth M. Kissling
Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications
When speaking their heritage language, heritage speakers typically sound much like other “native speakers.” However, recent studies have found that heritage speakers (HSs) are highly variable and produce a range of more and less “native-like” phonetic features. In an effort to stimulate productive new research in this area, this article addresses some of the methodological challenges of heritage language phonetics research, namely dealing with high variability and identifying the best predictors of that variability. A study on heritage Spanish rhotics is presented to elucidate those methodological challenges. The study took an exploratory, bottom-up approach to analyzing the rhotics produced by …
Pronunciation Instruction Can Improve L2 Learners' Bottom-Up Processing For Listening, Elizabeth M. Kissling
Pronunciation Instruction Can Improve L2 Learners' Bottom-Up Processing For Listening, Elizabeth M. Kissling
Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications
Listening is widely regarded as an important skill that is difficult and necessary to teach in L2 classrooms. Listening requires both top-down and bottom-up processing, yet pedagogical techniques for the latter are often lacking. This study explores the efficacy of pronunciation instruction (PI) for improving learners’ bottom-up processing. The study recruited 116 relatively novice learners of Spanish as a foreign language and provided the experimental groups with brief lessons in PI emphasizing segmental or suprasegmental features followed by production-focused or perception-focused practice. Learners’ bottom-up processing skill was assessed with a sentence-level dictation task. Learners given PI on suprasegmental features followed …
Auditory Disruption Improves Word Segmentation: A Functional Basis For Lenition Phenomena, Jonah Katz, Melinda Fricke
Auditory Disruption Improves Word Segmentation: A Functional Basis For Lenition Phenomena, Jonah Katz, Melinda Fricke
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
This paper presents evidence that spirantization, a cross-linguistically common lenition process, affects English listeners’ ease of segmenting novel “words” in an artificial language. The cross-linguistically common spirantization pattern of initial stops and medial continuants (e.g. [ɡuβa]) results in improved word segmentation compared to the inverse “anti-lenition” pattern of initial continuants and medial stops (e.g. [ɣuba]). The study also tests the effect of obstruent voicing, another common lenition pattern, but finds no significant differences in segmentation performance. There are several points of broader interest in these studies. Most of the phonetic factors influencing word segmentation in past studies have been …