Spanish in Albuquerque, New Mexico: Spanish-English Bilingual Adults’ and Children’s Vocalic Realizations

Sarah Lease

doi:10.3390/languages7010053

Abstract

This study explores vocalic production and variation in 29 Spanish-English bilingual children and adults from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Linear mixed-effects models analyzed the effects of lexical stress, word position, phonetic context, Spanish use, and lexical frequency on the F1 (height) and F2 (frontedness) values of 2041 /i e a o u/ vowels. Importantly, results show that /u/ fronting is pervasive in both children and adults’ speech, but in contrast to adults’ more general /u/ fronting, children’s Spanish use also predicted atonic /u/ fronting. Expanding the range of data to include children also showed that children’s realizations displayed a generalized stress effect, whereby the atonic space was condensed compared to the tonic space. The generalized stress effect was absent among the adults. Changes in the degree of phonetic convergence between the adults and children are attributed to acquisitional paths and demographic changes in their community.

Highlights

The body of acoustic work on adult Spanish heritage speakers’ phonetic and phonological patterns has grown substantially, but acoustic research on child heritage Spanish speakers’ phonetic and phonological development in the United States has been less abundant (Menke 2010, 2015, 2018)
Most researchers are in agreeance that heritage speakers’ Spanish phonetic patterns can show evidence of phonetic convergence with English-like sound patterns (Blair and Lease 2021; Henriksen 2015; Ronquest 2012), but it is undetermined the degree of phonetic variation that is shared between child and adult heritage speakers in the same community
The spectral qualities of adults’ vocalic realizations are in line with what has been described in the past literature for Spanish vowel spaces of Spanish-English bilingual adults

Summary

Introduction

The body of acoustic work on adult Spanish heritage speakers’ phonetic and phonological patterns has grown substantially (see Ronquest and Rao 2018 for a review), but acoustic research on child heritage Spanish speakers’ phonetic and phonological development in the United States has been less abundant (Menke 2010, 2015, 2018). Most researchers are in agreeance that heritage speakers’ Spanish phonetic patterns can show evidence of phonetic convergence with English-like sound patterns (Blair and Lease 2021; Henriksen 2015; Ronquest 2012), but it is undetermined the degree of phonetic variation that is shared between child and adult heritage speakers in the same community. The present study adds to this body of phonetics-phonology research on US Spanish heritage speakers by studying the concomitant effects of established and novel variables predicting vocalic variation in children and adults. The present study includes a lexical frequency measure to better describe vocalic variation among Spanish heritage speakers. This will be the first time that a lexical frequency variable is used to examine

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion