Inspired by the relatively sparse amount of previous work on heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology, this study examined the intervocalic productions of /bdg/ in the read and spontaneous data of eight participants between the ages of 18-21, each of whom was classified as a regular speaker, a childhood speaker, a childhood addressee or a speaker with minimal exposure to Spanish (cf. Oh & Au, 2005). An acoustic analysis of the data revealed a three-way allophonic classification of all relevant tokens: pure approximants, tense approximants and stops (cf. Martínez Celdrán, 1985, among others). Mixed-effects models were run to analyze the effects of phoneme, syllable stress, task, and word position, as well as interactions between these variables, on the realizations of /bdg/. The statistical results showed that the native-like pure approximants appeared at a significantly lower rate in /b/, in stressed syllables, at word boundaries, and in the reading task. The phoneme /b/’s interactions with the word boundary and spontaneous task variables generated a significant decrease and increase in pure approximants, respectively. When /b/ corresponded with the grapheme <v>, tense approximants were at their highest rate, but they were significantly lower in the spontaneous task. A significant interaction between these two variables informed us that /b/<v> reduced its tense approximant rate in the spontaneous task. Stops namely exhibited opposing significant main effects and interactions when compared to pure approximants. Regarding individual differences, regular speakers’ productions resembled native-like patterns, while highly variable patterns were present across the other three speaker classes, suggesting that a consistent connection with Spanish well beyond childhood is important for achieving target-like pronunciation in a heritage language as a young adult.
Recent literature on Spanish intonation assumes that deaccenting occurs when a lexical item fails to cue stress via an F0 rise or some other pitch movement through its stressed syllable. Inspired by the findings and suggestions for future research by Face (2003), the present study fills in research gaps by examining seven potential influences on deaccenting, working with spontaneous speech, and addressing the understudied Barcelona dialect of Spanish. The analysis of 160-170 minutes of spontaneous speech data collected at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona reveals that the odds of deaccenting increase in words that are high frequency in Spanish, have fewer syllables, are verbs or adverbs, are uttered multiple times within a recent timeframe, or are in initial or medial positions of the phonological phrase. Finally, high frequency verbs and adverbs, as well as adverbs, nouns, and verbs with fewer syllables are all especially prone to deaccenting.
This paper overviews what we currently know about the phonetics/phonology of heritage speakers of Spanish based on previous research on this topic, and also provides suggestions for future directions to pursue, as inspired by previous work on heritage Spanish, adult learners of Spanish, native Spanish, and other heritage languages. Specifically, we examine the past and future of heritage Spanish phonetics/phonology at both the segmental (i.e., consonants and vowels) and suprasegmental (i.e., intonation, rhythm, stress) levels in terms of how this part of heritage Spanish grammars differs from that of other Spanish-speaking populations. Finally, we discuss a series of methodological factors to consider as investigators continue to advance this area of linguistic inquiry.
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