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Part of
Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity
Edited by Elena Babatsouli
[Studies in Bilingualism 67] 2024
► pp. 380–402

Chapter 14
Acoustic properties of word-final vowels and the acquisition of gender in Spanish-English heritage speakers

| University of Toronto
| University of Toronto

This chapter explores whether contact-induced reduction in the inventory of Spanish unstressed vowels due to contact with English impacts the development of gender morphology and concord in Spanish-English bilinguals, through the comparison of recent findings from narratives elicited from bilingual adults and children born in the US. Final unstressed /a, e, o/ were acoustically analyzed and noun phrases were grammatically analyzed. Adult early bilinguals displayed a large degree of vocalic overlap but were highly accurate in gender. Children showed variability in their patterns of vocalic overlap and in gender accuracy ranging between 66% to 100%. Results do not offer a strong support for the hypothesis of a phonetic contribution to heritage gender divergence and call for refined analyses of the interaction between phonetics and morphosyntax in gender acquisition.

Keywords: Spanish-English bilinguals, gender, unstressed vowels, phonetic variability
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background: Acquisition of gender and vocalic systems in Spanish-English bilinguals
    • 2.1Acquisition of Spanish gender
    • 2.2Spanish vowels in Spanish-English bilinguals
    • 2.3Connections between grammatical and phonetic acquisition
  • 3.Study 1: Vowel production and gender accuracy in narratives produced by adult early bilinguals, late bilinguals, and monolinguals (Colantoni et al., 2020)
    • 3.1Methods
    • 3.2Results
    • 3.3Discussion
  • 4.Study 2: Vowel production and gender accuracy in narratives produced by Spanish-English bilingual children (Pérez-Leroux et al., 2023)
    • 4.1Methods
    • 4.2Results
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.Revisiting the connection between phonetic variability and acquisition of gender
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.14col
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