Production Of Labiodental Fricative /v/ In Heritage Speakers Of Spanish

Author

Andrea Michelle Nunez, University of Texas at El Paso

Date of Award

2024-12-01

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Linguistics

Advisor(s)

Annie Tremblay

Abstract

AbstractThe present study investigates the factors that influence Heritage Spanish speakersâ?? production of the allophone [v]â??namely its corresponding orthography ( vs. ), the phonological context in which it is produced (VCV vs. NCV, where V = vowel, C = consonant, N = /n/), and participantsâ?? language dominance (Spanish vs. English). More specifically, this study seeks to determine whether, for these Spanish speakers, [v] contrasts with /b/ (hence, /v/) or is an allophone of /b/. Standard Spanish does not have /v/, but it has â??an orthographic form of /b/, which in turn has (at least) two allophonic realizations: [b] after nasals and pauses, and [β] elsewhere. It has been reported that [v] occurs in some Spanish dialects in contact with languages that have /v/ (e.g., English; Hualde & Colina, 2014), especially in Spanish-English cognates (Davidson, 2019). However, the phonological status of [v] in these Spanish speakersâ?? productions is unclear. Forty native Spanish speakers living in the US who varied in their dominance in Englishâ??as determined by the Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire (Gertken, Amengual, & Birdson, 2014)â??completed a picture-naming task, a spelling task (to ensure that they knew how to spell the Spanish words tested), and a read-aloud task. The target words started with an orthographic or and were preceded by a feminine determiner (VCV, where [β] is expected) or masculine determiner (NCV, where [b] is expected) (e.g., un bote, una bota, un velo, una vela). All words were disyllabic and stressed on the penultimate syllable. Participants were audio- and videorecorded while producing speech, and the words were coded for whether a [v] was produced based on the visual articulatory information provided by the videorecordings (Vergara, 2010). The results revealed a marginal interaction between task and orthography, with a stronger effect of orthography on [v] productions in the read-aloud task than in the picture-naming task. The results also revealed a significant three-way interactions (with task as a fixed effect) between orthography, phonological context, and language dominance, with the effect of orthography being stronger in VCV contexts than in NCV contexts, and with that interaction being stronger in English-dominant speakers than in Spanish-dominant speakers. The numerical results showed that the great majority of [v] productions were found in the presence of orthographic and in VCV contexts, where [β] is expected. This was true for both Spanish-dominant and English-dominant speakers, but the effect was more accentuated in English-dominant speakers. These results strongly suggest that Heritage Spanish speakers treat [v] as an allophone of /b/ (similarly to [β]) in the presence of an orthographic in the target words. We propose that this orthographic effect is perceptually driven, revealing an important interaction between orthographic and phonological representations of bilinguals.