English loanwords and the presence of hesitation phenomena in speech of European Spanish an Mexican speakers an approach

Abstract

This article analyses the prosodic adaptation of Anglicisms in a spontaneous speech context by native European Spanish and Mexican speakers. The change of code between languages ​​may carry prosodic markers (Navracsics, 2014), which can be a disfluency phenomenon, such as a short pause or syllable lengthening for hesitation — these being the two most common hesitation patterns (Deme & Markó, 2013). The research has been conducted on filled pauses and lengthening of the Spanish and Mexican language varieties, based on audio corpus of native Spanish and Mexican speakers, following Cantero’s method of  Prosodic Analysis of Speech (2019) with modest changes. In this preliminary study, we have found that hesitation can be observed in the context of Anglicisms in the majority of both Mexican and Spanish speech productions, but a difference was discovered in its placement within the sentence. Furthermore, according to the sample, the relative syllable lengths of European Spanish speakers on a lengthened syllable differ more from the previous or the average syllable length of the speaker than in the case of slower Mexican speakers, where it is not always an obviously detectable phenomenon. Therefore, the decrease of speech rate around Anglicisms in the case of European Spanish speakers is more noticeable. Although longer syllables were also observed on Anglicisms themselves, the extent of this prolongation differed from the degree of syllables containing the hesitation phenomenon, and was probably caused only by the slower articulation of consonant clusters characteristic of Anglicisms.