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Article published In:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 31:1 (2018) ► pp.309–344

Acquisition of sociophonetic variation

Intervocalic /d/ reduction in native and nonnative Spanish

| University at Albany, SUNY
| Grand Valley State University
| Indiana University

This study investigates the acquisition of nativelike variation in the production of Spanish /d/ by English-speaking learners. Specifically, we examine the production of /d/ in word-internal intervocalic position in the speech of 13 highly advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and 13 native speakers (NSs) of Spanish in digitally-recorded sociolinguistic interviews. The analysis includes a discrete categorization of /d/ realization based on spectrographic examination (stop vs. spirant vs. deleted) and a continuous intensity difference measure. Tokens were coded for grammatical category, surrounding segments, stress, number of syllables, and lexical frequency. Results indicate that both NNSs and NSs exhibit /d/ spirantization and deletion, but these two processes are affected by different factors both between and across groups: NNS deletion patterns are predicted most significantly by lexical frequency, whereas degree of spirantization is influenced by articulatory/contextual factors of phonetic context and stress. NS patterns for both processes are influenced by most factors in a similar manner.

Keywords: second language acquisition, variation, sociolinguistic competence, phonetics, lexical frequency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The acquisition of variable structures
    • 2.2The target phone (/d/ in English and Spanish)
      • 2.2.1/d/ reduction in L1 Spanish
      • 2.2.2The acquisition of /d/ in L2 Spanish
    • 2.3Frequency
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Data
    • 4.3Coding/Analysis
      • 4.3.1Categorical coding
      • 4.3.2Continuous coding
      • 4.3.3Coding of linguistic factors
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Categorical results
    • 5.2Results of the continuous (intensity difference) coding
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.16028.sol
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