Spanish and English bilinguals: Between L1 and L2?

Abstract

The present study explores the vowel and intonation systems of heritage Spanish speakers in California based on a corpus of semi-directed interviews, to establish whether one language influences the other, or whether their English and for Spanish are closer to the monolingual speakers’ system of either language. There is some limited evidence that the vowel systems of Spanish in Spanish heritage speakers of Mexican descent in California is indeed very similar to the system of monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers (in pitch, duration, F1 and F2 values)—their English vowel system, however, and especially the front vowels, is not completely comparable to the published values for monolingual American English speakers’ vowels (Miglio, 2011). Intonation in bilingual Spanish has been shown to be influenced by English pitch movement, as well as signalling information structure (Gries and Miglio, 2015). This study widens the scope of the previous ones using data from natural speech as opposed to carrier sentences read out loud, and uses unpublished data from the same regional varieties of both English and Spanish, as spoken in California (monolingual English, bilingual English-Spanish), and in Mexico (monolingual Spanish) by individuals in the same age group and of comparable socio-cultural background.The present study explores the vowel and intonation systems of heritage Spanish speakers in California based on a corpus of semi-directed interviews, to establish whether one language influences the other, or whether their English and for Spanish are closer to the monolingual speakers’ system of either language. There is some limited evidence that the vowel systems of Spanish in Spanish heritage speakers of Mexican descent in California is indeed very similar to the system of monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers (in pitch, duration, F1 and F2 values)—their English vowel system, however, and especially the front vowels, is not completely comparable to the published values for monolingual American English speakers’ vowels (Miglio, 2011). Intonation in bilingual Spanish has been shown to be influenced by English pitch movement, as well as signalling information structure (Gries and Miglio, 2015). This study widens the scope of the previous ones using data from natural speech as opposed to carrier sentences r...