Date of Award

2024-05-01

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Linguistics

Advisor(s)

Annie Tremblay

Abstract

The Cue-Weighting Transfer Hypothesis states that (a) listeners weight acoustic cues according to how informative they are in signaling a lexical contrast in their L1, and (b) that listeners transfer their cue weightings from the L1 to the L2, using those cues that are important in the L1 to perceive lexical stress in the L2 (Tremblay et al., 2021). Most of the Spanish-English bilinguals in our region are highly proficient in both languages, but differ in their language dominance spectrums. That is, they can handle both languages with ease, but are usually more dominant in one of them. Because of the bilingual uniqueness of this region, the present study tests the Cue-Weighting Transfer Hypothesis from a language dominance perspective, as opposed to doing so from an L2 proficiency perspective, like previous cue-weighting research has done. We tested Spanish-dominant and English-dominant speakers from our region using a lexical stress perception task and a lexical stress production task to investigate if these participants show evidence of cue-weighting transfer from the dominant into the non-dominant language in the perception and production of lexical stress. Our results revealed various differences manifested as a result of language dominance effects, two of the most salient ones being that (i) English-dominant speakers use vowel reduction to a significantly higher degree than Spanish-dominant speakers, and that (ii) in the absence of vowel reduction use, Spanish-dominant speakers increase their reliance on other acoustic cues like duration and pitch instead when producing and perceiving lexical stress in English. Our results provide support for the Cue-Weighting Transfer Hypothesis. We suggest that the differences in cue weightings across languages can be modulated by language dominance, and not just by L2 proficiency, like previous research has shown. That is, cue-weighting differences can be observed in speakers who are highly proficient in both languages, but differ in their dominance continuum.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

68 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Natalia Irene Minjarez Oppenheimer

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