For some speakers of urban (Barcelona) Catalan, the height distinction between mid vowels is disappearing and schwa is lowering to something close to a low central vowel (Recasens 1991). This paper provides quantitative acoustic data to illustrate i) that these changes are present in young (college age) speakers of urban Catalan, and ii) that these changes are independent of one another. The changes, however, appear to be limited to urban varieties of Catalan. Quantitative acoustic data based on both non-sense words and free speech tokens indicate that neither mid-vowel neutralization nor schwa-lowering are reflected in the speech of young, female, non-Barcelona speakers of Catalan. All speakers had at least some college education and came from the following areas: Bages (Central Catalan), Girona (Central Catalan), Ciutadella (Balearic Catalan), Palma (Balearic Catalan), and Lloseta (Balearic Catalan).
2019. Weighing factors responsible for the production of the Catalan vowel /ɛ/ versus /e/ contrast in three districts of Barcelona. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:6 ► pp. 1264 ff.
Amengual, Mark
2016. Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Evidence of Cognate Effects in the Phonetic Production and Processing of a Vowel Contrast. Frontiers in Psychology 7
AMENGUAL, MARK
2016. The perception of language-specific phonetic categories does not guarantee accurate phonological representations in the lexicon of early bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics 37:5 ► pp. 1221 ff.
Amengual, Mark
2016. The perception and production of language-specific mid-vowel contrasts: Shifting the focus to the bilingual individual in early language input conditions. International Journal of Bilingualism 20:2 ► pp. 133 ff.
Lleó, Conxita
2016. Bilingualism and Child Phonology. In Oxford Handbook Topics in Linguistics,
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