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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11: Selected papers from the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario
Edited by Silvia Perpiñán, David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar and Adriana Soto-Corominas
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11] 2017
► pp. 191–207

Chapter 9
Voice quality transfer in the production of Spanish heritage speakers and English L2 learners of Spanish

| University of California, Los Angeles

The present study examines the use of creaky voice in the Spanish of two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals, namely, U.S. heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish and English L2 learners of Spanish. In American English, creaky voice is used utterance-finally, especially among young women, while it has rarely been found in Mexican Spanish. Participants’ H1-H2 values in utterance-final position were calculated to measure the degree of creaky voice and the values were compared to those of monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish. Results showed that while monolinguals did not use creaky voice, both heritage speakers and L2 learners did, especially the female speakers. The findings imply that, like other linguistic features, voice quality can be transferred from one language to another.

Keywords: voice quality transfer, creaky voice, heritage speakers, gender difference
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Creaky voice in American English and Mexican Spanish
    • 2.2Voice quality transfer among bilingual speakers
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials and procedures
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.09kim
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