Speech perception of /s/-leniting Spanish Dialects by late English-Spanish bilinguals
Open Access
- Author:
- Reichard, Caitlin Elizabeth
- Area of Honors:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Matthew Thomas Carlson, Thesis Supervisor
John Lipski, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- second language aquisition
speech perception
dialectal variation
perceptual learning
bilinguals
Spanish - Abstract:
- This thesis investigated speech perception of Spanish dialectal variation to word-final /s/ by late English-Spanish bilinguals. The experiment tested low proficiency Spanish (L2) learners’ sensitivity to the sibilant, aspirated, and deleted variants, which represent a lenition pattern of Spanish /s/. Aspiration is realized by an audible [h] sound, and deletion induces traceable, phonetic changes to neighboring sounds, which shall distinguish plural and singular stimuli. Participants completed a four-picture visual world paradigm with eye-tracking to assess plurality of auditory phrases as an implicit test of /s/ perception. Results showed categorical responses to singular, sibilant, and deleted stimuli: canonical [s] was perceived as “plural”, while deletion was perceived as “singular”. Accuracy for aspirated stimuli revealed distinct subgroups: a few participants who responded “plural” to most aspirated tokens and the majority who responded “singular” to such tokens. The former showed direct correlation between dialect contact and perception, and there was some evidence that one of these participants changed her behavior in favor of “plural” responses as the task progressed. Response times and eye-tracking data told a similar story as accuracy, in which some participants were sensitive to [h] and none were sensitive to the phonetic cues in a deleting dialect. Overall, this sample indicates low proficiency learners, with no prior dialect contact, are unlikely to adapt to L2 variation upon initial contact with a native speaker.