Dataset Information

Vowel reduction in word-final position by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals.

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Byers E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5383264 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Vowel reduction in word-final position by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals.

Byers Emily E Yavas Mehmet M

PloS one 20170406 4

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 sylla ...[more]

PMID: 28384234

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Project description:This study investigates the acquisition of anaphora resolution (AR) in Spanish as a second language (L2). According to the Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS), in native Spanish null pronominal subjects are biased toward subject antecedents, whereas overt pronominal subjects show a "flexible" bias (typically toward non-subject but also toward subject antecedents). The PAS has been extensively investigated in experimental studies, though little is known about real production. We show how naturalistic production (corpus methods) can uncover crucial factors in the PAS that have not been explored in the experimental literature. We analyzed written samples from the CEDEL2 corpus: L1 English-L2 Spanish adult late-bilingual learners (intermediate, lower-advanced and upper-advanced proficiency levels) and a control group of adult Spanish monolinguals (N = 75 texts). Anaphors were manually annotated via a fine-grained, linguistically-motivated tagset in UAM Corpus Tool. Against traditional assumptions, our results reveal that (i) the PAS is not a privileged mechanism for resolving anaphora; (ii) it is more complex than assumed (in terms of the division of labor of anaphoric forms, their antecedents and the syntactic configuration in which they appear); (iii) the much-debated "flexible" bias of overt pronouns is apparent since they are hardly produced and are replaced by repeated NPs, which show a clear non-subject antecedent bias; (iv) at the syntax-discourse interface, the PAS is constrained by information structure in more complex ways than assumed: null pronouns mark topic continuity, whereas overtly realized referential expressions (overt REs: overt pronouns and NPs) mark topic shift. Learners show more difficulties with topic continuity (where they redundantly use overt pronouns) than with topic shift (where they normally disambiguate by using overtly realized REs), thus being more redundant than ambiguous, in line with the Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis (PPVH) (Lozano, 2016). We finally argue that the insights from corpora should be implemented into experiments. The triangulation of corpus and experimental methods in bilingualism ultimately provides a clearer understanding of the phenomenon under investigation.

Dataset Information

Vowel reduction in word-final position by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals.

Publications

Vowel reduction in word-final position by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals.

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