The present study examined vowel-to-vowel (VV) coarticulation in backness affecting mid vowels /e/ and /o/ in 36 Spanish nonwords produced by 20 native speakers of Spanish, aged 19–50 years (mean = 30.7; SD = 8.2). Examination of second formant frequency showed substantial carryover coarticulation throughout the data set, while anticipatory coarticulation was minimal and of shorter duration. Furthermore, the effect of stress on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation was investigated and found to vary by direction. In the anticipatory direction, small coarticulatory changes were relatively stable regardless of stress, particularly for target /e/, while in the carryover direction, a hierarchy of stress emerged wherein the greatest coarticulation occurred between stressed triggers and unstressed targets, less coarticulation was observed between unstressed triggers and unstressed targets, and the least coarticulation occurred between unstressed triggers with stressed targets. The results of the study augment and refine previously available knowledge about vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Spanish and expand cross-linguistic understanding of the effect of stress on the magnitude and direction of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation.
Reduction of unstressed vowels is a well-known aspect of English phonology that is not present in Spanish, and the absence of such reduction contributes to accentedness in English for L1 Spanish speakers (Flege & Bohn, 1989). Previous studies have established that stress, coarticulatory effects of the previous consonant, and sociolinguistic factors can all lead to English vowel reduction in L1 and L2 speakers (Byers & Yavas, 2017). The current study investigates how lexical stress and sociolinguistic factors can affect vowel reduction in 10 American English monolinguals and 10 Spanish-English bilinguals from Colombia. A shadowing task provided acoustic measurements of formant frequencies for 60 target words in Spanish and English, encompassing five vowels from each language and two levels of stress. Factors such as language dominance, age of acquisition, linguistic attitudes, and length of residence were assessed through a questionnaire to examine their respective influences on the degree of vowel reduction shown by bilinguals relative to native monolinguals. Results address the degree of vowel reduction in L1 and L2 English and L1 Spanish, as impacted by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors.
In spoken language, gestural overlap in speech production regularly leads to coarticulation between neighboring segments, resulting in assimilation measurable by changes in the acoustic parameters. Vowels in adjacent syllables can coarticulate in a phenomenon called vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, which is subject to variation based on environmental factors such as surrounding consonantal context and the placement of stress. This study investigates vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Spanish in order to better understand the effect of stress and consonantal context on coarticulation. Formant analysis of vowels produced by 20 native speakers of Spanish was used to determine the presence and direction of coarticulation in trisyllabic nonce words with varying stress (/CVCVCV/ words, vowels /e, o/ as targets and /e, i, o, u/ as triggers, /k/ and /p/ contexts). Results showed that both anticipatory and carryover vowel-to-vowel coarticulation was present at vowel edges in all contexts, but only carryover coarticulation in backness extended to vowel midpoints. Stress placement mediated the coarticulatory effect with select target and trigger combinations in carryover coarticulation, while consonantal context played a greater role in anticipatory coarticulation. When stress played a role, unstressed target vowels were more susceptible to coarticulation, while stressed targets resisted coarticulatory effects.
Volga Tatar is a Turkic language spoken by 5 million people in Central Russia for which instrumental acoustic descriptions are lacking. This study uses formant analysis of acoustic recordings from 27 native speakers of Volga Tatar to describe the vowels of Tatar and evaluate the accuracy of previous impressionistic phonetic descriptions. In addition to describing the acoustic vowel space of Tatar, the study uses carefully chosen target words to evaluate vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in height and backness among the Tatar vowels /i, æ, ɑ/. Examining vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Tatar is of particular theoretical interest due to the presence of vowel harmony in the language. While the majority of native Tatar words are subject to backness, and possibly rounding, harmony, a large class of disharmonic lexical items, mostly from borrowings, provides insight into the coexistence of long-distance phonological vowel assimilation (vowel harmony) and long-distance phonetic vowel assimilation (coarticulation) in the same language. Previous research (Banerjee, Dutta, & S., 2017; Beddor & Yavuz, 1995) suggests that vowel harmony may suppress coarticulation proceeding in the same direction. However, the current results indicate that direction of coarticulation in Tatar is mediated primarily by other factors, such as target and trigger vowel identity.
Second language learning has been shown to affect first language production (Flege, 1987; Major, 1992; Sancier & Fowler, 1997, inter alia). Less is known about whether and how experience with another language may affect first language perception. The present study examines the use of preceding vowel duration vs. voicing during closure as cues to word-final and word-medial stop voicing by three groups of listeners: native speakers of American English (34), native speakers of Russian (34), and Russian expatriates in the United States (24). The results suggest that bilingual listeners are transferring a greater reliance on vowel duration, characteristic of English perceptual mode, into native speech categorization. The transfer occurred in word-final condition where vowel duration as a correlate of voicing is of very different importance in the two languages. Individual trends revealed that bilinguals’ reliance on vowel duration may even be exaggerated in native, compared to non-native, speech perception. The use of vowel duration in bilinguals was positively correlated with such individual differences as length of residence in the United States and average amount of speaking English per week. The triggers and possible benefits of such perceptual transfers are discussed in the context of language use in the expatriate communities.
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