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Recent Developments in Hispanic Linguistics: Studies in structure, variation, and bilingualism
Edited by Michael Gradoville and Sean McKinnon
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 41] 2024
► pp. 122–150

Chapter 5
More than occlusions

The role of duration in perceiving the Spanish tap-trill contrast by heritage speakers of Spanish

ORCID logo | Indiana University
ORCID logo | Indiana University
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The Spanish /ɾ/-/r/ contrast is prototypically maintained by number of occlusions; however, heritage and monolingual Spanish speakers also produce /r/ with one occlusion, using closure duration of the rhotic to maintain contrast. In the present study, 43 Spanish heritage speakers heard 40 Spanish words containing word-medial /ɾ/ with a closure duration between 22 ms and 85 ms. Using two types of tasks, a 2AFC heatmap categorical task and continuous rating Visual Analog Slider, listeners indicated whether they perceived a word containing /ɾ/ or /r/. Results of a binomial linear regression suggest that as closure duration increases, the probability of perceiving the phonemic trill increased significantly (β = −1.289, p < 0.001), with type of bilingualism and word-pair also being significant.
Keywords: heritage speakers, phonemic contrast, perception, rhotics, taps, trills, closure duration
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1The tap-trill contrast in Spanish
      • 2.1.1Differences between Spanish and American English rhotics
      • 2.1.2Mapping the rhotic system of a Spanish-English bilingual
    • 2.2Speakers of Spanish as a heritage language
    • 2.3Phonological systems of heritage speakers
    • 2.4Research questions and hypotheses
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Task
      • 3.2.1Vocabulary association training
      • 3.2.2Perception task
      • 3.2.3Background questionnaire
    • 3.3Stimuli creation
    • 3.4Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Response distributions
    • 4.2Results of statistical analyses
      • 4.2.1Variables predicting trill selection
      • 4.2.2Factors predicting certainty
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Research questions
      • 5.1.1RQ 1-Closure duration as a cue to trill status
      • 5.1.2RQ 2-Type of bilingualism and attention to CD of the rhotic segment
      • 5.1.3RQ 3-Factors that affect selection certainty
    • 5.2Additional considerations
      • 5.2.1Learning models
      • 5.2.2Community context and lexical input
      • 5.2.3Token frequency and bias
      • 5.2.4Naturalness of audio tokens
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.41.05gar
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