L2 perception of Spanish palatal variants across different tasks (original) (raw)
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Perceptual Assimilation of Occluded Voiced Stops by Spanish Listeners
Selected Proceedings of the 15th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 2013
Traditional accounts of the allophony of /bdg/ in Spanish describe it as a classic case of complementary distribution: /bdg/ appear as occluded voiced stops in phrase initial position, after nasals and after homorganic laterals, and as approximants elsewhere. This study aims to answer two questions: 1) how native Spanish listeners categorize occluded voiced stops in intervocalic positions, since they do not occur natively, and 2) how listeners rate them in terms of goodness of fit to their chosen native category. Two theories of cross-language speech perception make differing predictions of how occluded intervocalic voiced stops should be assimilated. Flege's Speech Learning Model, which posits that assimilation is based on position-specific allophones, predicts that intervocalic [bdg] would be assimilated to native Spanish /ptk/, since they are more similar acoustically. On the other hand, Best's Perceptual Assimilation Model, which posits higher order invariants as the units of perception, predicts that intervocalic [bdg] would be assimilated to /bdg/, since they are more similar articulatorily. The results of a cross-language perceptual assimilation task and a goodness rating task, using Brazilian Portuguese stimuli, reveal that native Spanish listeners assimilated occluded voiced stops to their native /bdg/ categories, despite their phonotactic deviance, albeit as worse exemplars of their respective /bdg/ categories. These findings support the predictions of Best's PAM rather than Flege's SLM, thereby suggesting that the mapping of non-native contrasts to native phonological categories, not just to position-specific allophones, plays a determining role in cross-language speech perception.
Language and Speech, 2016
Native speakers of Spanish with different amounts of experience with English classified stop-consonant voicing (/b/ versus /p/) across different speech accents: English-accented Spanish, native Spanish, and native English. While listeners with little experience with English classified target voicing with an English- or Spanish-like voice onset time (VOT) boundary, predicted by contextual VOT, listeners familiar with English relied on an English-like VOT boundary in an English-accented Spanish context even in the absence of clear contextual cues to English VOT. This indicates that Spanish listeners accommodated English-accented Spanish voicing differently depending on their degree of familiarization with the English norm.
Temporal variability in speech segments of Spanish: context and speaker related differences
Speech Communication, 2003
This article reports on segmental duration measurements of eight selected consonants (voiceless obstruents, nasals and liquids) and three vowels in 192 disyllabic (CVCe) nonsense words with stress on the first syllable, spoken in isolation by 12 Spanish speakers. Durations as measured based on acoustic discontinuities are discussed along with speaker variability. The intrinsic and context-dependent duration of consonants /f, h, x, s, m, n, l, r/ and vowels /a, i, u/, as well as the inter-speaker variability of these phonemes were analysed. Results show sizable differences in the duration of consonants (voiceless fricatives are longer than voiced fricatives) and vowels (/a/ has a longer duration than /i/ and /u/). With regard to contextual effects, there is a remarkable decrease and increase in vowel durations preceding voiceless fricatives and sonorants, respectively. These effects are present in all speakers. Our results on durational effects indicate that (a) the initial consonants /x, s/ and /r/ show larger differences among speakers; (b) effects for the vowel /a/ are greater than for the vowels /i/ and /u/; and (c) voiceless fricative consonants in medial position show greater intraspeaker idiosyncrasy than voiced consonants. The effects of anticipatory consonant-to-vowel coarticulation are discussed, as well as differences in segmental duration among speakers.
Journal of Phonetics, 2010
We conducted a production experiment with 1600 potentially ambiguous utterances distinguished by word boundary location in Catalan and Spanish (e.g., Cat. mirà batalles ‘(s)he looked at battles’ vs. mirava talles ‘I/(s)he used to look at carvings’; Span. da balazos ‘(s)he fires shots’ vs. daba lazos ‘I/(s)he gave ribbons’; stressed syllables are underlined). Results revealed strong effects of within-word position on H location. Peaks tended to be timed earlier with respect to the end of the syllable when their associated syllables occurred later in the word than when they occurred earlier in the word. These results confirmed previous findings for other languages (Silverman & Pierrehumbert, 1990 for English; Arvaniti, Ladd, & Mennen, 1998 for Greek; and Ishihara, 2006 for Japanese; and Godjevac, 2000 for Serbo-Croatian) and for Spanish and Catalan (Prieto, van Santen, & Hirschberg, 1995 for Spanish; de la Mota, 2005; Simonet, 2006, Simonet & Torreira, 2005 for Catalan). A set of perception experiments suggested that tonal alignment patterns influence listeners’ judgments of word boundary location both in Catalan and in Spanish. Listeners were able to employ fine allophonic details of H tonal alignment due to within-word position to identify lexical items that are ambiguous for word-boundary position. The data is consistent with the view that prosodic structure plays an essential part in determining the temporal coordination of f0 contours with segmental material.▶Position of the accented syllable in the word has significant effects on f0 peak location. ▶Perception results show that f0 peak placement can be a subtle cue to word boundary identification. ▶Prosodic structure plays a role in the timing coordination of f0 contours with segmental material.
Segmental environments of Spanish diphthongization
2001
Spanish diphthongization is a well-known example of an exceptionful phonological alternation. Although many forms do exhibit an alternation (e.g. [sentámos] ~ [sjénto] 'we/I sit', [kontámos] ~ [kwé nto] 'we/I count'), many others do not (e.g. [rentámos] ~ [rénto] 'we/I rent', [montámos] ~ [mónto] 'we/I mount'). Previous accounts of the alternation have largely accepted this unpredictability at face value, focusing on setting up appropriate lexical representations to distinguish alternating from non-alternating roots. Our interest is in whether Spanish speakers go beyond this, internalizing detailed knowledge of the ways in which diphthongization is conditioned by segmental environments.
Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 2019
Reduced vowels between obstruents and rhotics are durationally variable and phonologically invisible in Spanish, e.g. p ə rado ‘field’ as /pɾ/. The present study compares L1-Spanish speakers, English monolinguals, and L2-Spanish learners’ perceptual boundaries for reduced vowels in Spanish. A native speaker produced 70 Spanish nonce words with word-initial obstruent + vowel + flap sequences, and the duration of each vowel was manipulated from 100% to 75%, 50%, and 25% of its original duration. To determine whether these groups perceive variably reduced vowels as phonologically visible, 78 listeners counted the number of syllables perceived in 280 target audio files. Linear regression models fitted to 21,436 responses indicate that English monolinguals apply an L1 perceptual strategy, but L2-Spanish learners have shifted their perceptual boundaries. The study concludes that the perception of highly variable acoustic information becomes more native-like with greater L2 proficiency, while age of acquisition is less predictive of native-like perception.
Differential Contribution of Prosodic Cues in Native and Non-native Speech Segmentation
2011
The present study investigates the contribution of fundamental frequency (F0) in native English and native French listeners‟ segmentation of French speech. The results of a word-monitoring task with resynthesized stimuli show that pitch accents modulated speech segmentation for both groups, but unlike native listeners, the English listeners, who were at mid and high proficiencies in French, were not able to use F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. These findings are attributed to their native language, in which F0 rise is a cue to word-initial boundaries, and to the co-occurrence of F0 and duration cues in word-final syllables in French, thus preventing them from attending to F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries. Keywords: speech segmentation, prosodic cues, French, second/foreign language, lexical access F0 rise as a cue to word boundaries. It should be 1. INTRODUCTION An increasingly large body of evidence shows that native adult listeners use both accentual c...
Contextual variation in L2 Spanish: Voicing assimilation in advanced learner speech
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2014
The present study examines whether, and to what degree, regressive voicing assimilation of Spanish /s/ (as in rasgo/rasgo/ [ˈraz.ɣ̞ o]) occurs in the speech of advanced second language (L2) learners of Spanish. Acoustic analyses of L2 productions of /s/ in the voicing context (preceding a voiced consonant) and in the non-voicing context (preceding a voiceless consonant) elicited from a contextualized picture-description task revealed a contextual voicing effect in the speech of only a limited number of the advanced L2 speakers. The low occurrence of the assimilation process even amongst the advanced learners may be attributed in part to the variable nature of voicing in the input and to the complexity of the process (i.e. subject to different stylistic, linguistic, and social factors). The study also provides a phonetic description of the variants of L2 Spanish /s/ and finds that when voicing does occur, it is phonetically similar to native Spanish voicing in terms of the phonetic contexts in which voicing occurs, patterns of durational differences of /s/ according to voicing, and the variable nature of its occurrence.
Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 2019
Reduced vowels between obstruents and rhotics are durationally variable and phonologically invisible in Spanish, e.g. p[ə]rado 'field' as /pɾ/. The present study compares L1-Spanish speakers, English monolinguals, and L2-Spanish learners' perceptual boundaries for reduced vowels in Spanish. A native speaker produced 70 Spanish nonce words with word-initial obstruent + vowel + flap sequences, and the duration of each vowel was manipulated from 100% to 75%, 50%, and 25% of its original duration. To determine whether these groups perceive variably reduced vowels as phonologically visible, 78 listeners counted the number of syllables perceived in 280 target audio files. Linear regression models fitted to 21,436 responses indicate that English monolinguals apply an L1 perceptual strategy, but L2-Spanish learners have shifted their perceptual boundaries. The study concludes that the perception of highly variable acoustic information becomes more native-like with greater L2 proficiency, while age of acquisition is less predictive of native-like perception.