Vowel reduction in conversational Spanish by L1 and L2 speakers

Abstract

Non-native language learners may experience difficulty acquiring processes that occur in naturalistic speech. A particularly challenging case is unstressed vowel reduction, both in production, for speakers whose L1 lacks reduction, and suppression, for learners whose L1 reduces unstressed vowels. The latter is the case for English learners of Spanish: vowel reduction is rife in English but mainly realised phonologically, while Spanish is traditionally considered to be largely free of reduction. The current study analyses Spanish vowel realisations in English learners’ conversational speech, focusing on unstressed vowel reduction via shortening or centralisation. Vowels were extracted from the speech of ten British English and ten native Spanish speakers, elicited using a spot-the-difference picture task. While both Spanish and English speakers signalled absence of vowel stress for some vowels via durational shortening, only the English cohort exhibited centralisation of formant space. Counter-intuitively, unstressed vowel space area was equivalent for the two cohorts, and English speakers produced stressed vowels at more extreme locations than native speakers. A comparison of non-native Spanish vowels with native English productions from the same speakers suggests that L1 influence rather than hyper-articulation of stressed vowels accounts for English learners’ realisations of Spanish stressed and unstressed vowels in naturalistic speech.