Abstract
The lenition of Spanish intervocalic voiced stops, commonly grouped as /bdg/, has increasingly been examined within Spanish as a Heritage Language research. This study seeks to identify social, phonetic, and lexical factors that predict the degree of lenition of /bdg/ among heritage speakers of Spanish. We analyzed 850 intervocalic productions of /bdg/ by 20 adult Spanish heritage speakers of various generations in an oral word list production task. Using spectrographic analyses, productions were categorized as full approximant, tense approximant, and occlusive. Results from linear mixed-effects models indicated that the phonetic context and the number of family generations residing in the US significantly predicted the degree of lenition of intervocalic voiced segments while age of acquisition of Spanish, current contact hours, and cognate status did not predict changes in the degree of lenition. Specifically, as the speaker’s number of family generations residing in the US increased, fewer segments were lenited. We conclude that variations in /bdg/ lenition among heritage speakers of Spanish reflect the changes in pronunciation of other segments of heritage speakers over generations.
Highlights
When examining the following phonetic context with the linear mixed-effects models, we found that the bilabial segment was significantly more likely to lenite when followed by a middle vowel (p = 0.02)
This study has demonstrated that generation is a strong predictor of changes in the degree of lenition of /bdg/ among heritage speakers of Spanish (HSS)
This is similar to Henriksen (2015) in that as generation increases, pronunciations slightly shift from what is documented in infrequent English contact speech communities
Summary
HSS may be simultaneous bilinguals with exposure to both the majority language, English, and the heritage language, Spanish, before the onset of schooling. They may be sequential bilinguals, who receive exposure to Spanish until they start preschool or kindergarten when a shift towards primarily using English may begin. The sequential or simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and of English, the frequency of use of Spanish, and the number of family generations in the United States have all been identified as factors contributing to linguistic variation among heritage speakers (Escobar and Potowski 2015). This paper will examine some of the social and linguistic factors that may affect the degree of lenition of /bdg/, among HSS. We examine the role of cognate status in /bdg/
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