The Acquisition of the Spanish Trill (/R/) by Child Heritage Speakers: An Overview and Research Proposal

Abstract

I propose an analysis on the acquisition of the alveolar trill /r/ by Spanish-speaking children as a heritage language. I aim to determine to what extent the acquisition of the trill by these speakers may differ from the same process in monolingual children. To that end, I will recruit twenty children Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers (3-6 years of age), and twenty monolingual children of the same age who have never been exposed to another language. To collect the data, I will schedule brief Zoom meetings with the parents of the participants, and I will ask them to connect with the children to play a quick game (a picture-naming task). I will carefully listen to the recordings and examine the participant’s accuracy to produce the acoustic features of the Spanish trill. I will analyze all the tokens acoustically using PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2017). The research hopes to be a contribution in the field of phonological acquisition of Spanish in bilingual settings, and to fill a gap in the literature regarding the development of the trill by heritage speakers.