Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine phonetic interactions in early Spanish/English bilinguals to see if they have established a representation for the Spanish palatal nasal /ɲ/ (e.g., /kaɲon/ cañón ‘canyon’) that is separate from the similar, yet acoustically distinct English /n+j/ sequence (e.g., /kænjn̩/ ‘canyon’). Twenty heritage speakers of Spanish completed a delayed repetition task in each language, in which a set of disyllabic nonce words were produced in a carrier phrase. English critical stimuli contained an intervocalic /n+j/ sequence (e.g., /dɛnjɑ/ ‘denya’) and Spanish critical stimuli contained intervocalic /ɲ/ (e.g., /deɲja/ ‘deña’). We measured the duration and formant contours of the following vocalic portion as acoustic indices of the /ɲ/~/n+j/ distinction. The duration data and formant contour data alike show that early bilinguals distinguish between the Spanish /ɲ/ and English /n+j/ in production, indicative of the maintenance of separate representations for these similar sounds and thus a lack of interaction between systems for bilinguals in this scenario. We discuss these discrete representations in comparison to previous evidence of shared and separate representations in this population, examining a set of variables that are potentially responsible for the attested distinction.
Highlights
An overarching question in the field of bilingual phonology addresses the levels at and degree to which a bilingual’s phonetic and phonological systems interact and how these interactions can be modelled within a theory of bilingual grammar
A visual representation of the duration data is presented via the boxplot in Figure 4; as predicted, the vocalic portion of /n+j/ produced in English mode was longer than that of /ñ/ produced in Spanish mode
We have examined heritage Spanish speakers’ crosslinguistic production patterns of /ñ/ in monolingual Spanish mode and /n+j/ in monolingual English mode to determine whether their phonological systems interact in this scenario
Summary
An overarching question in the field of bilingual phonology addresses the levels at and degree to which a bilingual’s phonetic and phonological systems interact and how these interactions can be modelled within a theory of bilingual grammar. As of result of this acquisition trajectory, heritage speakers’ HL and majority language (ML) typically differ with regard to age and context of acquisition, frequency and context of usage, formal education, proficiency, and dominance (which often shifts from the HL to the ML once speakers reach school age), among other factors. These between-language differences yield a unique testing ground for the examination of how these factors modulate the nature of phonetic and phonological interactions in the bilingual mind. Empirical investigations into the nature and degree of these interactions in heritage speaker phonologies have experienced an uptick over the last decade (see (Chang 2020) for a comprehensive review) and a survey of the growing body of research indicates that production patterns in the heritage language often lie between those attested in late L2 learners of the heritage language that are L1
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