This study analyzes linguistic ideologies and attitudes of Spanish high school teachers in Western Massachusetts towards Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). An open-answer survey was conducted to examine the reactions of teachers towards utterances produced with well-documented Puerto Rican Spanish features. In the state of Massachusetts, Puerto Ricans…

The objective of the current study is to investigate the development of awareness of dialectal differences in Spanish by second language learners in a formal language learning classroom setting in the United States. Sensitivity toward different regional varieties of a language forms part of socio-linguistic--and ultimately,…

This sociophonetic study examines affricate variation through a continuous lens using diachronic data from Caracas Spanish. We investigate the relationship between frication and occlusion period duration in affricate segments across two steps. First, we present a phonetic characterization of the dependent variable and its variants. Second, we…

In this study we show that the perception of lateral variants by Puerto Rican listeners changes according to who the listener believes is speaking. Puerto Rican listeners heard sentences with target words featuring either rhotic [voiced alveolar tap or flap] or lateral [l] (amo[voiced alveolar tap or flap] -- amo[l]) codas, a sociophonetic…

The study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and voice onset time (VOT) in the production of Spanish stop consonants by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese who have learned English as their second language (L2). Six Chinese nationals studying Spanish in the United States at beginning levels and an advanced-level control were recorded…

Motivated by predictions of the theory of Input Processing, this study adds to previous research on second language (L2) Spanish pronunciation learning by investigating the impact of two distinct types of pronunciation assignments on first language (L1) English L2 Spanish students' improvement in pronunciation of the vowels /e, o/. Two sections of…

Spanish spelling, especially the use of written accent marks, is a major stumbling block for Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners (Carreira 2002). In fact, Mikulski (2006) found that most SHL learners ranked bettering their spelling and grammar as a very important learning goal. Despite its importance in literacy development and its perceived…

The present study reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of Spanish vowels by three different groups of speakers: 1) native Spanish speakers; 2) native English intermediate learners of Spanish; and 3) native English advanced learners of Spanish. In particular, we examined the production of the five Spanish…

Although previous research has documented the relationship between voice-onset time (VOT) and the production of foreign accent in English and Spanish, less is known about the role of this cue in perception. VOT refers to the aspiration that occurs between the release of a stop consonant and the beginning of the following segment. In Spanish and…

This investigation contributes to the understanding of language attitudes toward consonantal deletion by examining its perception using a matched-guise experiment (Casesnoves and Sankoff 2004; Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, and Fillenbaum 1960) with fifteen listeners. Two experiments were designed for testing language attitudes, one toward…

This study explores which features of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) pronunciation most impact raters' evaluations. Native Spanish speakers (NSSs) from regions with different pronunciation norms were polled: 147 evaluators from northern Mexico and 99 evaluators from central Argentina. These evaluations were contrasted with ratings from…

Even though many post-secondary institutions offer a variety of Hispanic linguistics classes (Hualde 2006; Lipski 2006), research on the pedagogy of Hispanic linguistics is an underdeveloped or non-existent area of the discipline. Courses in Hispanic linguistics can present not only linguistic challenges for non-native speakers of Spanish, but…

This article offers a fine-grained investigation of how first-language (L1) phonetics involving English rhotics affect Spanish rhotic production by second-language (L2) learners. Specifically, this study investigates how different L1 English rhotic articulatory routines (retroflex-like and bunched-like) and the phonetic context that produces…

Although it is broadly accepted that adult second-language (L2) learners focus attention only on those aspects of sounds needed for phonemic contrast, the role that allophony plays in the process of L2 speech learning is less well understood. It is widely assumed that speakers do not have conscious awareness of and access to first-language (L1)…

Describes a phonetics experiment at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, to test and improve pronunciation in Spanish with the use of an audio device known as Tok-Bak. (DS)