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Deconstructing Heritage Language Dominance: Effects of Proficiency, Use, and Input on Heritage Speakers’ Production of the Spanish Alveolar Tap

  • Ji Young Kim and Gemma Repiso-Puigdelliura
From the journal Phonetica

Abstract

This study considers language dominance as a composite of proficiency, use, and input, and examines how these constructs in Spanish influence heritage speakers’ production of Spanish alveolar taps. Two aspects of Spanish tap production were examined: lingual constriction rates and the degree of lingual constriction. Multiple measures associated with Spanish proficiency, use, and input were reduced to a smaller number of dimensions using principal component analysis, and the effects of the components on heritage speakers’ tap production were analyzed using mixed effects modeling. The overall findings suggest that dominance in Spanish may not have an effect on the degree of lingual constriction of heritage speakers’ taps, but it does have an effect on how frequently heritage speakers produce taps with lingual constriction. Spanish use and input were found to be the main contributors to heritage speakers’ target-like production of taps.


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*Ji Young Kim, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, 5310 Rolfe Hall, Box 951532, Los Angeles, CA, 90055-1532 (USA), E-Mail jiyoungkim@ucla.edu

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  1. 1

    While tap is considered as the canonical form in this position, its realizations may vary depending on the variety of Spanish (Bradley, 2004; Lipski, 1994; Lope Blanch, 1967; López Morales, 1992; Moreno de Alba, 1994; Serrano, 2006) and the emphasis of the speech (Hualde, 2005).

  2. 2

    While the English flap also occurs in other phonetic environments (see the section “Previous studies on the production of the Spanish alveolar tap by Spanish-English bilinguals”), in Hurtado and Estrada’s (2010) study, the Spanish tap either did not appear in such contexts or these contexts were not included in the study. That is, the intervocalic position was the only phonetic environment in which this sound occurs in both languages and, thus, more likely to demonstrate L1 influence.

  3. 3

    The author points out that the intensity difference results in the three studies cannot be directly compared to one another, due to different measurement methods. It was calculated as the difference between the minimum intensity of /r/ and (1) the average of the maximum intensity of the surrounding vowels (in intervocalic position), (2) the maximum intensity of the epenthetic vowel between /r/ and the preceding consonant (in post-consonantal position), or (3) the maximum intensity of the epenthetic vowel between /r/ and the following consonant (in pre-consonantal position).

  4. 4

    In Spanish, for the taps neighboring a consonant, an epenthetic vowel often appears between the tap and the previous consonant (Bradley, 2004; Colantoni & Steele, 2008; Gilbert & Rohena-Madrazo, 2017; Quilis, 1993) and between the tap and the following consonant (Bradley & Schmeiser, 2003; Colantoni & Steele, 2006), exhibiting a similar formant structure to that of a nuclear vowel. Colantoni and Steele (2008) put forth that vowel epenthesis occurs as an articulatory strategy to better dissimilate the tap from the neighboring consonant.

  5. 5

    The non-tap articulations observed in the present data were retroflex (35.2%), fricative (29.7%), lateral (7.7%), trill (3.3%), trill-like multiple soft constrictions (2.2%), and other unidentifiable variants (22%).

  6. 6

    A reviewer pointed out that fluency is confounded with speech rate in speech tempo (PROF.PC2), which makes the impact of this component uninterpretable. Thus, further analysis was carried out to examine the effects of the variables included in speech tempo (PROF.PC2) (i.e., speech rate, filler rate, mid-clause pause rate) on heritage speakers’ lingual constriction rates. The results showed that among the three variables, a significant effect was found for the mid-clause pause rate (β = 2.078, SE = 1.485, z = 2.746, p < 0.01), which indicates that the heritage speakers who produced more mid-clause pauses demonstrated higher lingual constriction rates.

  7. 7

    Similar to the case of the lingual constriction rates, further analysis was carried out to examine the effects of the variables included in speech tempo (PROF.PC2) on the degree of lingual constriction. The results showed that among the three variables, significant effects were found for the mid-clause pause rate (β = 7.927, SE = 3.239, z = 2.447, p < 0.05) and the filler rate (β = –15.653, SE = 3.6, z = –4.349, p < 0.001), which indicates that the heritage speakers who produced more mid-clause pauses and fewer fillers demonstrated a higher degree of lingual constriction. The speech rate only showed a marginally significant effect (β = 0.992, SE = 0.522, z = 1.9, p = 0.075).

  8. 8

    Please contact the corresponding author (jiyoungkim@ucla.edu) for further examination of the minimum intensity of the taps across the phonetic environments and the maximum intensity of the previous/following (epenthetic) vowels.

Received: 2018-09-14
Accepted: 2019-05-24
Published Online: 2019-07-30
Published in Print: 2020-02-01

© 2019 S. Karger AG, Basel

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