Rajiv Rao

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Wisconsin–Madison

This paper considers the differences between the acoustic correlates of the phonemic alveolar tap /ɾ/, phonemic canonical trill /r/, and alveolar approximant /ɹ/ in two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals: early (heritage Spanish) and late (native Spanish) bilingual speakers. In particular, the study explores cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and t...

This paper applies the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) model of intonation phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices (Sp_ToBI) annotation conventions to compare the intonational contours of declarative sentences in two varieties of Puerto Rican Spanish: (1) San Juan Spanish, spoken in the capital city of San Juan, and (2) Loíza Spanish, an Afro...

Resumen: El siguiente estudio contribuye con datos longitudinales procedentes de la producción de /b d ɡ/ en español por estudiantes de L1 inglés a lo largo de un año académico. El grupo de estudio está conformado por diez participantes que asistieron a una universidad del Medio Oeste de los EE. UU. De estos diez, cinco participantes vivían en una...

This study explores the effect of context of learning on the perception of Spanish lexical stress. Spanish is considered a mixed system (with predictable and unpredictable stress) and a stress-accent language. Tokyo Japanese is a good example of a language without stress, but with pitch-accent. Two groups of Japanese speakers (20 in Bogotá and 25 i...

Motivated by a growing body of research on heritage Spanish prosody, the current study uses the Sp_ToBi framework for the transcription of Spanish intonation to report trends in phonological targets of broad focus declaratives produced by heritage speakers of Chilean Spanish living in Stockholm, Sweden. Data were collected via semi-structured inter...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to validate four digitally recorded and phonetically balanced 50-word recognition lists in the White Hmong dialect with normal-hearing bilingual Hmong adults. Method Using a randomized, incomplete-block design, each participant listened to and repeated four unique Hmong lists delivered by a female and a male t...

The current study expands on Rao (2016) by quantifying the degree of similarity to (a) English and (b) parental intonation patterns in nuclear yes-no question intonation in Porteño (i.e., Buenos Aires, Argentina) Spanish HSs and Caraqueño (i.e., Caracas, Venezuela) Spanish HSs living in Ontario, Canada. Whereas the intonation contour in absolute in...

This study provides an acoustic analysis of voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops /ptk/ in Spanish, produced by heritage speakers (HSs) of Ukrainian and of Polish who are English-dominant and beginner or intermediate learners of Spanish as a third language (L3). Given that both Ukrainian and Polish, like Spanish and unlike English, are characte...

Motivated by existing research gaps exploring heritage Spanish, the current study analyzes the prosodic manifestation of sarcasm versus sincerity in 19 English-dominant, English-Spanish bilinguals residing in the Midwest region of the USA. In order to explore cross-generational effects and source input varieties, a subset of participants from withi...

This book focuses on contemporary sociolinguistic approaches to Spanish dialectology. Each of the authors draws on key issues of contemporary sociolinguistics, combining theoretical approaches with empirical data collection. Overall, these chapters address topics concerning language variation and change, sound production and perception, contact lin...

While heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology and classroom experiences have received increased attention in recent years, these areas have yet to converge. Furthermore, most research in these realms is cross-sectional, ignoring individual or group changes across time. We aim to connect research strands and fill gaps associated with the aforementi...

The current study delves further into the Chilean declarative intonational plateau patterns first documented in Rogers (2013) (i.e., rise, extended plateau, fall). Using a significantly larger amount of spontaneous data coming from 40 speakers of Chilean Spanish, and motivated by previous work on narrow focus on individual words in Spanish, we prop...

Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in Contact: Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain brings together scholars working on a wide range of aspects of the Spanish sound system and how their coexistence with another language in speech communities across the Hispanophone world influences their manifestation. Drawing upon seminal works in the fields...

This volume addresses a wide range of phenomena including intonation, restructuring, clitic climbing, aspectual structure, subject focus marking, code-switching, lenition, loanwords, and heritage learning that are central in Hispanic linguistics today. The authors approach these issues from a variety of recent theoretical approaches and innovative...

This study offers a prosodic analysis of broad focus declarative sentences in Chota Valley Spanish (CVS), an Afro-Hispanic dialect of Ecuador. Findings indicate that its phonological inventory of pitch accents and phrase boundary tones appears to be significantly simplified in comparison to what has been reported for other native, non-contact varie...

This paper provides an analysis of Chocó Spanish (CS) neutral declarative intonation. Results show that this Afro-Colombian dialect, in line with other black vernaculars spoken in Latin America and other cases of Spanish in contact, presents a reduced inventory of pitch accents when compared to other varieties of Spanish. Specifically, L+H* (i.e.,...

Inquires in Hispanic Linguistics: From Theory to Empirical Evidence showcases eighteen chapters from formal and empirical approaches related to Spanish syntax and semantics, phonetics and phonology, and language contact and variation. Drawing on data from a number of monolingual and contact Spanish varieties, this volume represents the most current...

This paper creates a novel link between research on linguistics and education by discussing what we know about the sound system of heritage language users of Spanish and how these findings can inform practices implemented in heritage Spanish courses in the USA. First, we provide an overview of terminology associated with heritage language research,...

Bringing together contributions from some of the leading experts in the field of Spanish as a Heritage Language, this volume aims to provide an in-depth understanding of current and emerging trends in research and praxis. To this end, the volume is divided into three thematic units. The first unit surveys the study of Spanish heritage speaker bilin...

This paper analyzes the spontaneously produced intonation of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) declaratives. ABS is an Afro-Hispanic language of the Americas (AHLAs) spoken in the region of Los Yungas, Department of La Paz, Bolivia. The main findings indicate the presence in ABS of certain intonational features that diverge from those of other native var...

This paper overviews what we currently know about the phonetics/phonology of heritage speakers of Spanish based on previous research on this topic, and also provides suggestions for future directions to pursue, as inspired by previous work on heritage Spanish, adult learners of Spanish, native Spanish, and other heritage languages. Specifically, we...

Inspired by the relatively sparse amount of previous work on heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology, this study examined the intervocalic productions of /bdg/ in the read and spontaneous data of eight participants between the ages of 18-21, each of whom was classified as a regular speaker, a childhood speaker, a childhood addressee or a speaker w...

Primarily inspired by Bustos de Gisbert (1986) , Hualde (2006/2007 ), and Moyna (2011) , specifically by their comments on stress deletion in the left members of some Spanish compounds, the current investigation fills a gap in this field by conducting an acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency evidence of stress in Spanish compounds and phonolog...

This study examined intervocalic productions of /b/ in heritage speakers of Spanish residing in the United States. Eleven speakers were divided into two groups based on at-home exposure to Spanish, and subsequently completed reading and picture description tasks eliciting productions of intervocalic /b/ showing variation in word position, syllable...

This study compared the prosody of sarcastic and sincere attitudes in Mexican Spanish in terms of three sentence-level factors (i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) mean, F0 range, and speed of speech) and three word-level factors (i.e. stressed syllable duration, F0 movement, and stressed vowel intensity). For F0, the connection between utterance-final...

Very little previous research has addressed the prosodic characteristics of third party complaints. This paper discusses an utterance and word level intonational analysis of this speech act in four speakers of Mexican Spanish. The effect of social distance/ power relationships was incorporated into the study by creating an experimental data elicita...

Work on intonation, especially related to Spanish, has not focused extensively on second language acquisition in general. Within this context, little to no research has addressed how language instructors use rhythm and melody to facilitate the oral comprehension of language learners. This study begins to enter this space by analyzing recordings of...

Recent literature on Spanish intonation assumes that deaccenting occurs when a lexical item fails to cue stress via an F0 rise or some other pitch movement through its stressed syllable. Inspired by the findings and suggestions for future research by Face (2003), the present study fills in research gaps by examining seven potential influences on de...

This paper aims to further enhance our knowledge of phrasing (i.e. the prosodic chunking of discourse) in the elicited, lab speech of Spanish. Specifically, Barcelona Spanish represents an intriguing object of study because very little previous work has addressed its phrasing, intonation, or its phonetics and phonology in general. Inspired by Priet...

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Previous studies on the intonation of Mexican Spanish, such as Prieto et al (1995, 1996) and Prieto (1998) examine phonetic trends such as fundamental frequency (F0) peak placement and downstepping contours. These studies provide important insight into the intonation of laboratory (i.e. read or scripted) speech, however, much remains undiscovered a...

The majority of studies addressing Spanish intonation, including work dating as far back as that of Navarro Tomás (1918, 1944) as well as studies conducted using the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology (Ladd 1996, Pierrehumbert 1980, Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988), have dealt with declaratives or interrogatives produced in a...