How Native Do They Sound?: An Acoustic Analysis of the Spanish Vowels of Elementary Spanish Immersion Students

• Mandy R. Menke ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Minnesota

     University of Minnesota

     City of Minneapolis, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Hispania, ISSN 0018-2133, Vol. 98, Nº 4, 2015, págs. 804-824
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Language immersion students' lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic competencies are well documented, yet their phonological skill has remained relatively unexplored. This study investigates the Spanish vowel productions of a cross-sectional sample of 35 one-way Spanish immersion students. Learner productions were analyzed acoustically and compared to those of Spanish-English bilingual peers. Findings reveal that learners' productions differ from those of their native Spanish-speaking peers on nearly all measures; observed differences may be the result of transfer of first language phonetic and phonological tendencies and the nature of the input received.