Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T04:44:59.720Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

L2 perception of Spanish palatal variants across different tasks*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2013

CHRISTINE SHEA  and
JEFFREY RENAUD
CHRISTINE SHEA*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa
JEFFREY RENAUD
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa
*
Address for correspondence: Christine Shea, 412 Phillips Hall, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52240, USAchristine-shea@uiowa.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While considerable dialectal variation exists, almost all varieties of Spanish exhibit some sort of alternation in terms of the palatal obstruent segments. Typically, the palatal affricate [ɟʝ] tends to occur in word onset following a pause and in specific linear phonotactic environments. The palatal fricative [ʝ] tends to occur in syllable onset in other contexts. We show that listeners’ perceptual sensitivity to the palatal alternation depends upon the task and exposure to Spanish input. For native Spanish listeners, the palatal alternation boosts segmentation accuracy on an artificial speech segmentation task and also reduces latencies on a phonotactically-conditioned elision task. L2 Spanish listeners, on the other hand, only benefit from the palatal alternation in the second task. These results suggest that while Spanish L2 learners benefit from the presence of the alternation in linear phonotactic terms, this benefit does not carry over to a more abstract segmentation task.

Keywords

SpanishallophonesL2 phonologyspeech perception
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 203 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for recommendations on how to improve this manuscript. We would also like to thank participants at the University of Iowa and the Centro de Enseñanza Extranjera at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (CELE-UNAM) in Mexico City.

References

Aguilar Cuevas, L. (1997). De la vocal a la consonante. Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela.Google Scholar
Alvar, M. (ed.) (1996). Manual de dialectología hispánica: el español de España. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel.Google Scholar
Campos-Astorkiza, R. (2012). The phonemes of Spanish. In Hualde, J.-I., Olarrea, A. & O'Rourke, E. (eds.), The handbook of Hispanic Linguistics (vol. 69), pp. 89–100. Malden, MA: BlackwellCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Babel, M., & Johnson, K. (2010). Accessing psycho-acoustic perception and language-specific perception with speech sounds. Journal of Laboratory Phonology, 1, 179–205.Google Scholar
Boomershine, A., Hall, K. C., Hume, E., & Johnson, K. (2008). The impact of allophony vs. contrast on speech perception. In Avery, P., Dresher, E. & Rice, K. (eds.), Contrast in phonology, pp. 143–172. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cho, T. (2001). Effects of morpheme boundaries on gestural timing: Evidence from Korean. Phonetica, 58, 129–162.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clopper, C. (2002). Frequency of stress patterns in English: A computational analysis. IULC Working Papers Online, 2. www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp/contents.cgi?which=2.Google Scholar
Davies, M. (2005). A frequency dictionary of Spanish: Core vocabulary for learners. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastián-Gallés, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A distressing “deafness” in French? Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 406–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finn, A., & Hudson Kam, C. (2008). The curse of knowledge: First language knowledge impairs adult learners’ use of novel statistics for word segmentation. Cognition, 108, 477–499.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fougeron, C., & Keating, P. (1997). Articulatory strengthening at edges of prosodic domain. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 3728–3740.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gebhart, A., Aslin, R., & Newport, E. (2009). Changing structures in midstream: Learning along the statistical garden path. Cognitive Science, 33, 1087–1116.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gordon, M. (1997). Syllable weight and the phonetics/phonology interface. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 23, 111–122.Google Scholar
Harris, J. (1983). Syllable structure and stress in Spanish: A nonlinear analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Holt, L. L., & Lotto, A. J. (2006). Cue weighting in auditory categorization: Implications for first and second language acquisition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 3059–3071.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hualde, J.-I. (2004). Quasi-phonemic contrasts in Spanish. In Chand, V., Kelleher, A., Rodríguez, A. J. & Schmeiser, B. (eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pp. 374–398. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Hualde, J.-I. (2005). Sounds of Spanish. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jimenez Sabater, M. (1975). Más datos sobre el español en la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: Ediciones Intec.Google Scholar
Johnson, K., & Babel, M. (2010). On the perceptual basis of distinctive features: Evidence from the perception of fricatives by Dutch and English speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 127–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenstowicz, M. (1994). Base-Identity and Uniform Exponence: Alternatives to cyclicity. Rutgers Optimality Archive [ROA 103].Google Scholar
Lipski, (1990). Aspects of Ecuadoran vowel reduction. Hispanic Linguistics, 4, 1–19.Google Scholar
Lope Blanch, J. (1989). La complejidad dialectal de México (Estudios de lingüística hispanoamericana 1410158). México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.Google Scholar
Lope Blanch, J. (1996). México. In Alvar (ed.), pp. 81–89.Google Scholar
Luce, P. A., & Pisoni, D. B. (1998). Recognizing spoken words: The neighborhood activation model. Ear and Hearing, 19, 1–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Martin Butragueño, P. (forthcoming). Estructura del yeísmo en la geografía fónica de México. In Gómez, R. & Molina, I. (eds.), El yeísmo en el mundo hispánico. Madrid: Iberoamericana Verveurt.Google Scholar
Martínez Celdrán, E. (2008). Some chimeras of traditional Spanish phonetics. In Colantoni, L. & Steele, J. (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology, pp. 32–46. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Martínez Celdrán, E., & Fernández Planas, A. (2007). Manual de fonetica Española. Barcelona: Editorial Ariana.Google Scholar
Pharies, D. A. (2007). A brief history of the Spanish language. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. (2006). The statistical basis of an unnatural alternation. In Goldstein, L., Whalen, D. H. & Best, C. (eds.), Laboratory phonology 8, pp. 81–107. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piñeros, C.-E. (2009). Estructura de los sonidos de español. Saddle River, NY: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Piñeros, C.-E. (2001). Segment-to-syllable alignment and vocalization in Chilean Spanish. Lingua, 111, 163–188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quilis, A. (1984). Métrica española. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar
Saffran, J., Aslin, R., & Newport, E. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926–1928.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sebastián-Gallés, N., Martí, M. A., Carreiras, M., & Cuetos, F. (2000). LEXESP: Léxico informatizado del español. Barcelona: Ediciones Universitat de Barcelona.Google Scholar
Shea, C., & Curtin, S. (2010). Discovering the relationship between context and allophones in a second language: Evidence for distribution-based learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 581–606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shea, C., & Curtin, S. (2011). Experience, representations and the production of second language allophones. Second Language Research, 27, 229–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundara, M. (2005). Acoustic-phonetics of coronal stops: A cross-language study of Canadian English & Canadian French. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118, 1026–1037.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, M., & Cutler, A. (2009). Cross-language differences in cue use for speech segmentation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126, 367–376.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weber, A., & Cutler, A. (2006). First-language phonotactics in second-language listening. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 597–607.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weiss, D., Gerfen, C., & Mitchel, A. (2009). Speech segmentation in a simulated bilingual environment: A challenge of statistical learning? Language Learning and Development, 5, 30–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar