An Airflow Analysis of Spanish and English Anticipatory Vowel Nasalization among Heritage Bilinguals

Abstract

Gestural timing overlap between a vowel and subsequent nasal consonant results in the vowel being articulatorily nasalized. Research has shown that such degree of coarticulation varies cross-linguistically (e.g., English exhibits a greater gestural timing overlap than Spanish). This phenomenon has mainly been investigated in monolingual samples, and with only a small number of studies focusing on second and heritage language gestural timing patterns of nasality; the role of bilingualism in this respect is thus an open question, which is the focus of the current study. Sixteen second-generation US-born heritage bilinguals participated in this experiment. Their degree of bilingualism was assessed via the Bilingual Language Profile. They completed two separate read-aloud tasks: one in Spanish (heritage language) and one in English (second language). Simultaneous oral and nasal airflow were collected via pressure transducers from words that included phonetically oral and nasalized vowels. Results indicate that heritage bilinguals increment the degree of vocalic nasalization from Spanish to English. Nevertheless, their degree of bilingualism did not yield statistical significance in phonetic performance. The current study is the first one implementing aerodynamic methods with a heritage bilingual population and presents data for the possibility to possess two segment-to-segment timing strategies in heritage grammars.