The Effects of Code-Switching and Lexical Stress on Vowel Quality and Duration of Heritage Speakers of Spanish

Vanessa Elias,Sean Mckinnon,Ángel Milla-Muñoz

doi:10.3390/languages2040029

Vanessa Elias, Sean Mckinnon + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/languages2040029

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Abstract

The quantity of research on Heritage Speakers (HS) of Spanish phonetics has increased over the last decade, including studies on the possible effect of code-switching on Spanish phonetics. Following this line of research, the present study investigates the role of code-switching and lexical stress on Spanish HS vowel production, specifically if the introduction of English reduces the vowel quality and duration of Spanish vowels after a code-switch. Eleven Spanish HSs participated in a controlled narration task in which they were asked to read aloud texts that code-switched between English and Spanish and one text that only contained Spanish. PRAAT was used to segment the vowels and the F1 and F2 values, along with duration, were extracted. The results show that both code-switching and lexical stress significantly affect Spanish HS vowels. Code-switching and vowels in unstressed position were more centralized than the vowels in the monolingual Spanish session and vowels in stressed position, respectively; unstressed vowels were also shorter in duration than stressed vowels. These results show that the introduction of English—a language in which vowel quality and duration change between unstressed and stressed syllables—via code-switching significantly affects Spanish HS vowels, subsequently providing evidence for transient interference.

Highlights

Within the tradition of Hispanic linguistics, the quantity of research on heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish has expanded over the past few decades, as can be seen from the increase in edited volumes [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] and state-of-the-art review articles [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15] on the subject
The following section is divided according to the results of the linear mixed effects models for normalized F1/F2 values and vowel duration (Section 3.1), and of the linear mixed effects models for the code-switching subset of the data to examine the potential effect of distance from code-switching site and F1/F2 normalized values and vowel duration (Section 3.2)
With the purpose of increasing the body of research on Spanish HS phonetics, the present study explored whether the vocalic system of HSs of Spanish was influenced by the effects of code-switching between English and Spanish

Summary

Introduction

Within the tradition of Hispanic linguistics, the quantity of research on heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish has expanded over the past few decades, as can be seen from the increase in edited volumes [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] and state-of-the-art review articles [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15] on the subject. HS phonetics and phonology by investigating the role that code-switching and lexical stress play on Spanish HS vowel production, if simultaneous activation of English and Spanish reduces the vowel quality and duration of Spanish vowels. While previous studies have found a significant effect of lexical stress on Spanish HS vowel quality and duration [16], code-switching has not been examined within this particular area. The student may speak or merely understand the heritage language and be, to some degree, bilingual in English and the heritage language” [17] (p. 1)

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