Perception of American English final consonants by speakers of New York-Dominican Spanish

Abstract

The English language uses many final consonants and final clusters to convey meaning, especially for morphological endings. The Spanish language employs fewer final consonants than the English language, and Caribbean Spanish speakers treat many final consonants as optional. In this experiment, speakers originating from the Dominican Republic (N = 25) participated in a listening task in which they had to identify final consonants in fast and clear sentences in English (stimulus corpus Ito, K, 2011). A small group of native American English speakers was tested, and performed at ceiling. Spanish-speaking participants' performance on the experimental task varied from 40% to native-like accuracy and was statistically different from the native speakers’ performance (Mann Whitney U = 8, p < .003). In addition, Spanish-speaking pariticpants’ performance on the final consonant perception task correlated strongly with performance on a standardized aural/oral language battery known as the Versant Test (Pearson Corp, 2011)(r = .76, p < .001); performance also correlated strongly with age of acquisition. The coarticulation of adjacent speech sounds played a role in which consonants were most difficult to perceive. Future directions, including the current testing of speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish, Kannada and Russian, and implications for intervention, will be discussed.