Goodness evaluation by L1 Spanish speakers of various allophones, made by human and by vocal tract models, of the Spanish phonemes /l/ and /r/

Abstract

The present study reports the results of two perceptive experiments, in which L1 speakers of Peninsular Spanish were asked to listen to a series of sound stimuli and to evaluate the goodness of each stimulus as a realization of Spanish consonant /l/ or /r/. The stimuli were made of natural human voice in the first experiment, and with a set of vocal tract models in the second experiment. The results were similar for the two experiments. The lateral approximant stimuli were highly evaluated as allophones of /l/. Some lateral approximant stimuli were longer than others, but the duration difference caused little effect on the evaluation. The flap stimuli obtained low scores as /l/. Conversely, for the phoneme /r/, only the flap stimuli acquired high evaluations, while all the lateral approximant stimuli obtained extremely low scores. The retroflex approximant stimuli, similar to English /r/, obtained low evaluations for both /l/ and /r/ in the first experiment using a human voice, while they were evaluated slightly higher as /l/ than as /r/ in the second experiment using the vocal tract models. These results are expected to provide L2 Spanish learners with useful knowledge in their pronunciation learning.