This paper reports on an acoustic analysis of the phonemic tap-trill contrast (/ɾ/-/r/) for first and second generation speakers of Mexican Spanish who live in the Chicagoland area. First, it is shown that speakers most commonly produce phonemic trills with a single apical occlusion, although there is much individual variation. Second, nearly all speakers realize the tap-trill contrast by means of segmental duration, and this is especially true for speakers who favor zero or one closures in the phonemic trill. These data suggest that heritage speakers make use of the limits of phonetic variation to the extent that phonological contrasts are intact in their grammar. The findings have implications for disentangling the sources of individual variation in heritage pronunciation. Specifically, we propose that between-speaker instabilities in rhotic production result more directly from an inherently variable speech signal than from the language contact situation.
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2020. Teaching the Spanish trill to L1 English speakers using ultrasound instruction: a preliminary study on pronunciation pedagogy. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 7:1 ► pp. 20 ff.
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2019. Heritage speakers’ use of prosodic strategies in focus marking in Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:5 ► pp. 986 ff.
Amengual, Mark
2018. Asymmetrical interlingual influence in the production of Spanish and English laterals as a result of competing activation in bilingual language processing. Journal of Phonetics 69 ► pp. 12 ff.
Amengual, Mark
2019. Type of early bilingualism and its effect on the acoustic realization of allophonic variants: Early sequential and simultaneous bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:5 ► pp. 954 ff.
Putnam, Michael T., Tanja Kupisch & Diego Pascual y Cabo
Bayram, Fatih, Josh Prada, Diego Pascual y Cabo & Jason Rothman
2016. Why Should Formal Linguistic Approaches to Heritage Language Acquisition Be Linked to Heritage Language Pedagogies?. In Handbook of Comparative Studies on Community Colleges and Global Counterparts [Springer International Handbooks of Education, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
Bayram, Fatih, Josh Prada, Diego Pascual y Cabo & Jason Rothman
2018. Why Should Formal Linguistic Approaches to Heritage Language Acquisition Be Linked to Heritage Language Pedagogies?. In Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education [Springer International Handbooks of Education, ], ► pp. 187 ff.
Bayram, Fatih, Josh Prada, Diego Pascual y Cabo & Jason Rothman
2018. Why Should Formal Linguistic Approaches to Heritage Language Acquisition Be Linked to Heritage Language Pedagogies?. In Handbook of Comparative Studies on Community Colleges and Global Counterparts [Springer International Handbooks of Education, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
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2016. How the demographic makeup of our community influences speech perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139:6 ► pp. 3076 ff.
2016. Research on Heritage Spanish Phonetics and Phonology: Pedagogical and Curricular Implications. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research 5:2 ► pp. 99 ff.
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