Lexical and Acoustic Factors in the Perception of the Spanish Diphthong vs. Hiatus Contrast

Investigating L2 Acquisition of Spanish Vocalic Sequences

“…The durations of the diphthongs were Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 7/28/15 10:10 AM shorter, on average, than the durations of the hiatus, for each speaker. In addition, Face & Alvord (2004) found that speakers of Barcelona Spanish were able to distinguish between diphthongs and exceptional hiatus with considerable accuracy on the basis of duration.…”

“…Aguilar (1999) notes that diphthongs often do not have two clear steady states and are more accurately characterized by "a continuous transition from one frequency area to another" (Aguilar 1999, p.62). Speaker intuitions regarding the syllabification of vocalic sequences (as diphthong or hiatus) have been shown to be fairly robust (at least for Peninsular Spanish: Face & Alvord 2004, Hualde & Prieto 2002, and several experimental studies have attempted to determine what the acoustic correlates of these intuitions are. Building on the observation that hiatus are typically longer than diphthongs (Aguilar 1999, Borzone de Manrique 1979, Quilis 1981, Hualde & Prieto (2002) compared the syllabification intuitions and productions of six native speakers of Madrid Spanish to determine to what extent the durational difference agreed with the intuitions.…”

“…As discussed in §2.1, hiatus are typically longer than diphthongs (Aguilar 1999, Face & Alvord 2004, Hualde & Prieto 2002, MacLeod 2007. The first hypothesis predicted that the beginning learners would produce a smaller durational difference between the two categories, and that, within the intermediate learner group, the difference would be positively correlated with proficiency with Spanish.…”

“…This study considers the developmental path of acquisition of diphthongs and hiatus by English-speaking learners of Spanish. Previous studies have found that duration is a robust acoustic cue to the difference between a diphthong and a hiatus (Face & Alvord 2004, Hualde & Prieto 2002. This study investigates how the durational difference is manifest in the speech of L2 learners of Spanish and how its realization changes as a function of proficiency in Spanish.…”

Hiatus Resolution in Spanish: Motivating Forces, Constraining Factors, and Research Methods

“…In addition to vowel quality, other phonological factors associated with hiatus resolution are the relative position of the vowel sequence in the word and its proximity to stress. The influence of stress on the pronunciation of adjacent vowels in Spanish has been analyzed in a significant number of studies (Hualde , ; Jenkins ; Hualde and Prieto ; Face and Alvord ; Alba ; Simonet ; Cabré and Prieto ; Chitoran and Hualde ; Garrido ; Hernández ). Stress has been identified as a determining factor to explain why some hiatus sequences are more resistant to undergo changes than others.…”