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Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in Contact: Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain
Edited by Rajiv Rao
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 28] 2020
► pp. 63–82

Chapter 3
The vowel spaces of Spanish-K’ichee’ bilinguals

| Middlebury College
The point vowels /i, a, u/ serve to mark the extremes of the acoustic vowel space; however, previous experimental research on K’ichee’ has shown that the acoustic location of point vowels varies according to the vowel inventory of the specific dialect of K’ichee’. The present study analyzes the acoustic vowel spaces of Guatemalan Spanish monolinguals and of Spanish-K’ichee’ bilinguals from two K’ichee’ dialects with different vowel inventories. The results of a production task reveal that the bilingual Spanish vowel spaces differ from those of monolinguals. Furthermore, although these bilinguals maintain cross-language differences in their mid vowels, their Spanish point vowels correspond in acoustic location to their K’ichee’ point vowels, meaning they have similar acoustic vowel spaces in both languages.
Keywords: acoustic vowel space, point vowels, Guatemalan Spanish, K’ichee’, bilingualism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Vowel spaces and point vowels
  • 3.The present study
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Spanish vowel comparisons across dialects
    • 5.2Spanish and K’ichee’ bilingual vowel comparisons
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 6 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.28.03bai
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