Contextual variation in L2 Spanish: voicing assimilation in advanced learner speech
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[1] University of Missouri-St. Louis
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- Localización: Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, ISSN-e 2199-3386, ISSN 1939-0238, Vol. 7, Nº. 1, 2014, págs. 79-113
- Idioma: inglés
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- Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
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Resumen
The present study examines whether, and to what degree, regressive voicing assimilation of Spanish /s/ (as in rasgo /rasgo/ [ˈraz.ɣ̞o]) 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.
