Stylistic Variation in Heritage Spanish Vowel Production

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While recent studies of Spanish vowels produced by heritage speakers of Spanish (HSS) have revealed important differences in acoustic distribution and unstressed vowel reduction in comparison to monolingual norms (Alvord & Rogers, 2014; Boomershine, 2012; Ronquest, 2013; Willis, 2005), the influence of speech style on vowels produced by HSS remains relatively unexplored. Previous research examining stylistic variation in monolingual and bilingual varieties of Spanish report vowel space expansion in controlled speech relative to spontaneous speech (Alvord & Rogers, 2014; Harmegnies & Poch-Olivé, 1992; Poch-Olivé, Harmegnies, & Martín Butragueño, 2008) and increased vowel duration (Bradlow, 2002), although many of these studies included a small number of participants or did not examine the entire vowel system. The present investigation extends previous research by including a larger number of speakers and three novel tasks, as well as examining the effects of style on both quality and duration throughout the system as a whole. Acoustic and statistical analyses confirmed an overall vowel space expansion effect in controlled speech similar to that reported in previous studies, although not all vowels varied equally and along the same dimensions. Furthermore, vowel duration exhibited less variation than expected and was limited to the lowest vowels, suggesting that vowel quality and duration may be affected independently of one another. Combined, the general results not only reveal that speech style has a similar impact on vowels produced by HSS and other bilingual and monolingual populations, but also emphasize the importance of analyzing the entire vowel system on multiple dimensions.