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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. 403–425

Chapter 15
Production of Spanish laterals in early sequential Spanish-English bilinguals

| Florida International University
| Florida International University

This chapter reports on the phonetic production of Spanish laterals of a group of Spanish heritage speakers. Twenty adult female early sequential bilinguals who were all English dominant participated in the investigation. The study investigated the question if the participants’ Spanish productions had any evidence of influence of the dominant language (English). The productions of the target Spanish laterals in different syllable positions and adjacent to different vowels were elicited in a reading aloud task. Bilinguals’ productions were compared to those of monolingual controls and were, overall, found like those. Although there was individual variation in bilinguals’ productions, English dominance scores did not seem related to these variations. Thus, the dominance ratings obtained through language use, proficiency, self-reporting, and language attitudes do not necessarily translate into the phonetics/phonology of the bilinguals.

Keywords: Spanish-English bilinguals, language dominance, ‘clear’ vs. ‘dark’ laterals, acoustics of laterals
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The speech learning model (SLM)
    • 1.2Laterals in Spanish and English
  • 2.Acoustic investigations of bilingual laterals
  • 3.The present study
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Materials and procedure
    • 4.3Acoustic analysis
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
  • Appendix
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.15yav
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