The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the perception of unstressed vowel reduction (UVR)--also known as vowel devoicing--in Central Mexican Spanish. UVR is a variable, gradient process in which vowels undergo a constellation of phonetic weakening processes including shortening, devoicing, and apparent deletion (Gordon 1998). While it is…

This study examined Spanish spelling errors among 166 native Spanish-speaking students from Kindergarten to Grade 3 based on a spelling-to-diction task. Fifteen types of spelling errors were analyzed in a latent class analysis. Results suggested three phases of spellers: Phase 1 students had a high chance of committing almost all types of errors.…

Millions engage in learning a Second Language (L2) using their mobile devices with a wide range of success. Concomitantly, there exists a growing interest in research on the effects of mobile-assisted language learning and predictors of learner outcomes (e.g., Loewen et al., 2020; Sudina & Plonsky, 2023). However, few of these apps and studies…

This study examines how dominance and proficiency relate to Spanish heritage speaker vowel productions. Participants' normalized vowel measurements were compared to nonheritage native speakers of Spanish and English using the Pillai score, an output of Multivariate Analysis of Variances (MANOVAs) that allows comparisons across distributions of two…

Although there is a growing consensus that, in reading acquisition, it is essential to provide children with learning activities that promote the development of reading cognitive schemes, particularly intra-syllabic related patterns, there is no agreement on which kind of syllabic schemes should be worked out in the first place. The main aim of…

This document is an English-language abstract (approximately 1,500 words) of a guide prepared by the National Pedagogic Institute for the teaching of reading and writing. The general principles in the guide will tend to unify first grade teaching methods. A brief presentation gives a description of the parts in which the guide is divided. (1)…

Included in the phonology are three contrastive lexical tones, a prepause syllable (as part of intonation), nine oral vowels, four nasal vowels, and many consonant clusters which differ in accordance with their distribution in reference to their place in the word: prestress, stressed syllable, and poststress. (SCC)

Spanish spoken in Mexico City is influenced considerably more by indigenous dialects than by archaic or present usage of peninsular Spanish. Six areas in particular fall under this influence: (1) the phoneme "s", treated as a palative and fricative sound, (2) voiced "s", which is dental alveolar and affricate, (3) "t"…

Tested the interlanguage structural conformity hypothesis by examining how frequently young adult, native Spanish speakers in Mexico modified English two- and three-member onsets. Results indicate that three-member onsets were modified significantly more frequently than were two-member onsets and that epenthesis occurred more frequently after…

Describes features of articulatory shortcuts discovered among middle class, educated native speakers of Spanish in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. It is maintained that these features should be taught to students of Spanish in order that they may understand colloquial Spanish speech. (AM)