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Corpus Dialectology
Edited by Elissa Pustka, Carmen Quijada Van den Berghe and Verena Weiland
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 110] 2023
► pp. 106–132

Sociogeographical differences in the pronunciation of Anglicisms in Spanish

Acoustic vowel analysis using multilevel regression models

| University of Vienna
| University of North Texas
In this paper we propose a possible statistical analysis of sociogeographical differences in two Spanish varieties in the context of loanword phonology. For this purpose, we extracted formant frequencies of Anglicisms from corpus data from Mexico and Spain, with a particular focus on the realisation of the English vowel /ʌ/ (e.g., [bɾʌnt͡ʃ]). We used a Multilevel Bayesian regression model to infer various fixed effects on the phonic realisation. The analysis shows that geographical proximity to the U.S. does not impact the realisation in our data. Speakers’ exposure and affinity towards the English language, on the other hand, favour imitation of the English vowel. This seems to be especially relevant in our globalised world, where English media are ubiquitously available.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Choice of the phoneme /ʌ/
    • 2.2Corpus
      • 2.2.1Participants
      • 2.2.2Tasks
      • 2.2.3Internal variables
      • 2.2.4External variables
    • 2.3Acoustic analysis
    • 2.4Statistical analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Distribution of the frequency values in the vowel space
    • 3.2Analysis of predictors
    • 3.3Posterior varying effects
    • 3.4Analysis of the latent variable
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Adaptation of the phoneme
      • 4.1.1Realisation of grapheme-phoneme correspondences vs. imitation of the English vowel
      • 4.1.2Differences in pronunciation between words
    • 4.2Factors influencing the realisation of the phoneme
      • 4.2.1Language exposure and affinity
      • 4.2.2Speakers’ provenance
      • 4.2.3Internal variables
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.110.05bau
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