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Contextual Variation in L2 Spanish: Voicing Assimilation in Advanced Learner Speech
Abstract
The present study examines whether, and to what degree, regressive voicing assimilation of Spanish /s/ (as in rasgo /rasgo/ [ˈraz.ɣ̞ o]) occurs in the speech of advanced second language (L2) learners of Spanish. Acoustic analyses of L2 productions of /s/ in the voicing context (preceding a voiced consonant) and in the non-voicing context (preceding a voiceless consonant) elicited from a contextualized picture-description task revealed a contextual voicing effect in the speech of only a limited number of the advanced L2 speakers. The low occurrence of the assimilation process even amongst the advanced learners may be attributed in part to the variable nature of voicing in the input and to the complexity of the process (i.e. subject to different stylistic, linguistic, and social factors). The study also provides a phonetic description of the variants of L2 Spanish /s/ and finds that when voicing does occur, it is phonetically similar to native Spanish voicing in terms of the phonetic contexts in which voicing occurs, patterns of durational differences of /s/ according to voicing, and the variable nature of its occurrence.
... Regarding the L2 production of /s/-weakening, the research so far has shown that L2 learners, even those who are highly proficient or have been exposed to /s/-weakening, do not tend to employ /s/-weakening. For example, Schmidt (2014) examined the production of preconsonantal /s/ by 14 advanced speakers of Spanish in controlled oral tasks. When coded categorically (voiced vs. unvoiced), she found that the L2 learners rarely produced / s/-voicing even when the following consonant was voiced. ...
... Given that these continuous variables all indicate phonetic reduction, one would expect that as duration and COG of an /s/ decrease, the amount of voicing would increase. Indeed, Schmidt (2014) found this to be the case for /s/-voicing and /s/ segment duration in her study. In this study, Kendall's rank correlation tests 5 confirmed this assumption as /s/-voicing had a significant negative correlation with duration (τ = À0.14, p < 0.001) and COG (τ = À0.15, ...
... Our L2 learners not only voiced /s/ tokens at Time 1 and Time 2, they significantly increased the amount of voicing of coda /s/ in the direction of the NSs between times. This finding contrasts with Schmidt (2014), who found that very few /s/ tokens (only 4.5%) produced by advanced L2 learners had a percentage of voicing at or above 60%. In our study, by the end of SA, 25.7% of the /s/ tokens produced by the DR students and 12.8% of the /s/ tokens produced by the Spain students were at or above 60% voicing. ...
This study examines the second language (L2) development of variable /s/-weakening in the spontaneous speech of L2 learners of Spanish who studied abroad in either Dominican Republic, where /s/-weakening is widespread, or central Spain, where /s/-weakening is much less common. Learners’ realizations of /s/ were coded impressionistically and acoustically by measuring voicing, center of gravity, and duration. The results show that regardless of the study abroad location, students did not change the amount of sibilance they produced over time. However, they became more nativelike with respect to /s/-voicing and duration. Additionally, whereas some linguistic factors were found to significantly constrain /s/-weakening across groups, learners did not gain sensitivity to all factors that constrain native-speaker /s/-weakening. Findings suggest that exposure to /s/-weakening during a semester abroad is insufficient for learners to adopt this sociolinguistic variable and other social and cognitive factors likely mitigate its integration into the L2 learners’ phonological systems.
... The only study that tackles VA in Spanish is Schmidt (2014), who examines /s/ voicing in L2 Spanish by native English speakers. The author observes that only a limited number of advanced L2 learners show contextual voicing effects in Spanish, which means that even advanced learners preserve the voicing patterns of English. ...
... The author observes that only a limited number of advanced L2 learners show contextual voicing effects in Spanish, which means that even advanced learners preserve the voicing patterns of English. The focus of the present study is very similar to Schmidt's (2014) in that it examines to what degree regressive voicing assimilation (RVA) of Spanish /s/ is attested in the speech of advanced L2/FL learners. On the other hand, it differs from the aforementioned study in several ways. ...
... Firstly, we investigate the productions of native speakers of Hungarian, a language that belongs to the same typological group with regard to voicing as Spanish (both are true-voicing languages with RVA, unlike English). Secondly, in Schmidt (2014) all voiced consonants are treated as belonging to the same category (i.e., voiced consonants) and are expected to behave in the same way with regard to VA, while this study examines the similarities and differences in the voicing propensity of voiced obstruents compared to sonorant consonants in the Spanish interlanguage of advanced learners whose native language is Hungarian. 5 Thus the focus of the present study is, on one hand, to find out whether explicit instruction and awareness raising (a three-month Spanish phonetics and phonology seminar) have a beneficial effect on the acquisition of the variable /s/ voicing in Spanish, which clearly is a feature that contributes to more native-like pronunciation but probably has little impact on comprehensibility. ...
This study examines the effect of explicit phonological instruction on the acquisition of variable /s/ voicing in Spanish by advanced Hungarian learners. Hungarian and Spanish have very similar, yet not identical, voicing assimilation (VA) systems; the most important difference lies in the pre-sonorant context as sonorant consonants trigger voicing assimilation in Spanish but not in Hungarian. Data were collected in acoustic experiments from 7 native speakers of Northern Peninsular Spanish and 12 Hungarian university students who were advanced learners of Spanish. The latter group was tested twice: before and after a three-month Spanish phonetics and phonology course. Our data reveal that this amount of instruction is not enough for L2 speakers to overcome their first language VA system, which might be attributed, in part, to the variable allophonic nature of the process and the similarity between the two languages’ VA systems.
... The few studies on L2 assimilation acquisition yield conflicting results. On the one hand, the results of Schmidt [10] concerning the acquisition of regressive assimilation of voicing by English learners of Spanish showed that few learners, even the most advanced ones, exhibited L2 assimilation in their productions. On the other hand, in a series of perceptual experiments about assimilation compensation, Darcy et al. [11] showed that, whereas beginners applied their native compensation pattern to L2, advanced speakers were able to compensate for L2 assimilation processes. ...
... Results show that there is no systematic voicing assimilations in either direction, progressive or regressive, and that there are no significant differences between advanced speakers and beginners. This tends to corroborate the results obtained by Schmidt [10], in her study about L2 assimilation production, and does not correspond to the perceptual results obtained by Darcy et al. [11], presented in the introduction. The absence of systematic assimilations in one direction is clearly shown by the results obtained for /v/ and /z/ since, in the second condition, favourable to the presence of assimilation and inside which both consonants are considered by learners as lenis, the ratios between VV (both consonants are mainly voiced) and UU (both consonants are mainly unvoiced) sequences are of 50/17 for /v/ against 37/43 for /z/ (see Table 1). ...
... In the Spanish interlanguage of L1 Hungarian learners, there is only one alveolar sibilant, which is voiceless, and they seem to intend to realize it as such in their speech, a tendency reinforced by orthography. Similarly to L1 English learners of Spanish described by Schmidt (2014), there are differences between the letter-to-sound correspondences between L1 Hungarian, L2 English, and L3 Spanish. While the letter "z" in both L1 and L2 stands for the voiced alveolar fricative, this is not the case in L3 Spanish. ...
The present paper investigates the link between perception and production in the laryngeal phonology of multilingual speakers, focusing on non-contrastive segments and the dynamic aspect of these processes. Fourteen L1 Hungarian, L2 English, and L3 Spanish advanced learners took part in the experiments. The production experiments examined the aspiration of voiceless stops in word-initial position, regressive voicing assimilation, and pre-sonorant voicing; the latter two processes were analyzed both word-internally and across word boundaries. The perception experiments aimed to find out whether learners notice the phonetic outputs of these processes and regard them as linguistically relevant. Our results showed that perception and production are not aligned. Accurate production is dependent on accurate perception, but accurate perception is not necessarily transferred into production. In laryngeal postlexical processes, the native language seems to play the primary role even for highly competent learners, but markedness might be relevant too. The novel findings of this study are that phonetic category formation seems to be easier than the acquisition of dynamic allophonic alternations and that metaphonological awareness is correlated with perception but not with production.
... Finally, an important line of recent research has begun to explore the acquisition of phonological processes in L2 Spanish. For instance, Schmidt (2014) examined the realization of regressive voicing assimilation (e.g. mismo /mismo/ [ˈmiz.mo] ...
The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics - edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin August 2018
Previous research on the phonetics and phonology of code-switching has largely focused on word internal phenomenon, such as voice onset time. However, many phonological processes occur across word boundaries, and in the case of code-switching, potentially across language boundaries. This study examines the application of phonological rules across word and language boundaries in cases of code-switching, exploiting cross-linguistic differences in voicing assimilation and spirantization processes in English and Spanish. Results from an oral production paradigm conducted with Spanish–English bilinguals showed an asymmetrical impact of code-switching: switched and non-switched tokens differed in Spanish, but not English. A similar pattern was found for bilinguals of different language dominance profiles. This asymmetry is discussed with respect to the different language-specific degrees of variability in production. Moreover, results from the current study suggest that while phonological processes may be anchored to language-specific lexical items or phonemes, the licensing environment is language non-specific.
This volume compiles eight original chapters dedicated to different topics within bilingual grammar and processing with special focus on code-switching. Three main features unify the contributions to this volume. First, they focus on making a contribution to our understanding of the human language within a coherent theoretical framework; second, they understand that a complete theory of the human language needs to include data from bilinguals’ I-languages; and third, they are committed to obtaining reliable data following experimental protocols.
Cambridge Core - Latin American Studies - The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics - edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin
This study tests the hypothesis that late first-language English / second-language Spanish learners (L1 English / L2 Spanish learners) acquire spirantization in stages according to the prosodic hierarchy (Zampini, 1997, 1998). In Spanish, voiced stops [b d g] surface after a pause or nasal stop, and continuants [β̞ ð̞ ɣ̞] surface postvocalically, among other contexts. We adopt an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the phenomenon that assumes that postvocalic continuants surface due to the ranking of prosodic positional faithfulness constraints below a markedness constraint that prohibits stops in postvocalic position. L1 English speakers are presumed to start with a ranking in which prosodic positional faithfulness outranks the markedness constraint. In line with the Gradual Learning Algorithm (Boersma and Hayes, 2001), gradual demotion of the relevant faithfulness constraints is predicted in L2 Spanish, extending the prosodic domain until continuants surface postvocalically across domains. A cross-section of 44 L1 English / L2 Spanish learners and a control group (n = 5) completed a recitation task, and data were analysed acoustically for manner of articulation and degree of constriction. Results partially align with Zampini’s impressionistic data: Learners first produce underlying stops as postvocalic approximants at the onset of the syllable (word-medial position), followed by the onset of the prosodic word (word-initial position). Unlike Zampini’s findings, there is no evidence for an intermediate stage of acquisition across the boundary of a word and its clitic. Advanced L2 learners produce continuants in postvocalic position at all applicable prosodic levels, which we take to indicate acquisition of the target ranking. We also examined whether learners’ postvocalic continuants are lenited to the same degree as the control group, and whether degree of lenition changes across development. The difference in degree of lenition between controls and learners lessens at higher levels of the prosodic hierarchy as acquisition progresses, and several advanced learners produce target-like segments across prosodic levels.
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