Categorical perception of L2 vowel spaces: Quechua-Spanish bilinguals, Andean region of Ecuador
Open Access
- Author:
- Sabo, Emily Rae
- Area of Honors:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- John Lipski, Thesis Supervisor
John Lipski, Thesis Honors Advisor
Marianna Nadeu, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Quichua language
Quechua language
Andean Spanish
bilinguals
vowel spaces
phonology
second language acquisition - Abstract:
- Are bilinguals who are immersed in their dominant language able to perceive the vowels of their second language like native speakers of that language perceive them? The present study answers this question from a sociophonetic perspective, offering data from Quechua dominant Quechua-Spanish bilinguals of highland Ecuador. Quechua, a language family indigenous to South America, has been in contact with the Spanish language since Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire in the 16th century. Despite contact between Spanish and Native American languages, Quechua-speaking communities continue to thrive throughout highland Ecuador. In fact, many village elders are nearly Quechua monolinguals, knowing little more than a few phrases in Spanish. Members of present-day Quechua communities typically grow up exclusively speaking Quechua and only learn Spanish upon entrance to the school system, around age five. Although ultimately fluent in both languages, these individuals do not learn standardized Spanish. Instead, they learn a local variety that is generally colored with a Quechua accent. What makes this group interesting is that the two languages they speak have dissimilar vowel systems and the way they resolve this disparity reveals greater implications regarding the bilingual mind. What is known about these Quechua-dominant bilinguals is that their average vowel productions often do not accurately approximate those of native canonical Spanish speakers. This is attributed to the difference in vowel inventory between the two languages: Quechua has only three vowels (/ɪ/ /a/ /ʊ/) while Spanish has five (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/). Preceding research shows that Quechua-dominant bilinguals often experience difficulty distinguishing Spanish mid- high vowel contrasts such as /e/ - /i/ and /o/ - /u/. The stimuli for this experiment were created by artificially synthesizing a series of high and mid vowels from within the Spanish vowel inventory. In the first of two tasks, participants were asked to decide whether or not they perceived pairwise stimuli as sounding phonetically the “same” or “different.” For the second task, they were presented with the synthesized vowels in isolation and asked to categorically determine which of the high or mid vowels they perceived: /e/, /i/, /o/, or /u/. This thesis concludes that the bilingual group seems to manage a phonemic topology that is dissimilar to monolinguals. The empirical data from the present study reveals that while Quechua-dominant participants are able to perceive Andean Spanish front vowels in an almost native-like way, the same cannot be said for back vowels. It was determined that while these bilinguals adjust their vowel organization to approximate an Andean Spanish phonemic distinction, they ultimately do not partition mid-high vowels in the same way that Spanish monolinguals do. While this only loosely holds true for anterior vowels, it is certainly true for back vowels.