Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to the central vowel space can be problematic. Failure to maintain this pattern of stressed-unstressed syllables in American English is one key element that contributes to a “foreign accent” in second language speakers. Reduced vowels, or “schwas,” have also been identified as particularly vulnerable to the co-articulatory effects of adjacent consonants. The current study examined the effects of adjacent sounds on the spectral and temporal qualities of schwa in word-final position. Three groups of English-speaking adults were tested: Miami-based monolingual English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals, and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Subjects performed a reading task to examine their schwa productions in fluent speech when schwas were preceded by consonants from various points of articulation. Results indicated that monolingual English and late Spanish-English bilingual groups produced targeted vowel qualities for schwa, whereas early Spanish-English bilinguals lacked homogeneity in their vowel productions. This extends prior claims that schwa is targetless for F2 position for native speakers to highly-proficient bilingual speakers. Though spectral qualities lacked homogeneity for early Spanish-English bilinguals, early bilinguals produced schwas with near native-like vowel duration. In contrast, late bilinguals produced schwas with significantly longer durations than English monolinguals or early Spanish-English bilinguals. Our results suggest that the temporal properties of a language are better integrated into second language phonologies than spectral qualities. Finally, we examined the role of nonstructural variables (e.g. linguistic history measures) in predicting native-like vowel duration. These factors included: Age of L2 learning, amount of L1 use, and self-reported bilingual dominance. Our results suggested that different sociolinguistic factors predicted native-like reduced vowel duration than predicted native-like vowel qualities across multiple phonetic environments.

Aims: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether bilinguals categorically displayed shorter or longer schwa durations between fixed word pairs where one word contains a deletable syllable and the other does not (as in "rational" [raeʃənəl] → [raeʃnəl] compared with "rationality" [raeʃənaeləti]). We hypothesized that monolingual and early bilingual speakers would produce shorter values for "deletable" schwas whereas late bilinguals would not. Methodology: Twenty native English speakers and 40 Miami-based Spanish-English bilinguals (20 early and 20 late bilinguals) were asked to read sentences containing target words from 10 semantically related word pairs. Analysis: A three-way mixed model ANOVA was performed to determine the relationship between schwa duration and the following factors: language group, word root, and deletable/nondeletable category. Pairwise t-tests were also performed on individual categories to determine if semantically related pairs differed in duration. Conclusions: Results indicated that native English speakers produce significantly shorter durations for schwa in deletable versus non-deletable position. Early bilingual productions are very similar to those of English-only speakers, whereas late bilinguals display much longer durations in both categories. Originality: This study is the first to directly compare word-internal vowel duration patterns in Spanish-English bilingual speakers. Implications: These results indicate that age of L2 acquisition is a predictive factor in determining how native-like an L2 speaker's pronunciation of reduced vowels will be. Limitations: Given the specific nature of the word pairs tested, a reading instrument was the most efficient manner of eliciting target word pairs. Future studies should try to evaluate this issue using other types of stimuli.

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