Stress-Induced Acoustic Variation in L2 and L1 Spanish Vowels

• Published in: Phonetica Vol. 75; no. 3; p. 190
• Main Authors: Romanelli, Sofía, Menegotto, Andrea, Smyth, Ron
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland 01.07.2018
• Subjects: Adult; Analysis of Variance; Female; Humans; Language; Multilingualism; Phonetics; Speech Acoustics
• ISSN: 1423-0321
• DOI: 10.1159/000484611

We assessed the effect of lexical stress on the duration and quality of Spanish word-final vowels /a, e, o/ produced by American English late intermediate learners of L2 Spanish, as compared to those of native L1 Argentine Spanish speakers. Participants read 54 real words ending in /a, e, o/, with either final or penultimate lexical stress, embedded in a text and a word list. We measured vowel duration and both F1 and F2 frequencies at 3 temporal points. stressed vowels were longer than unstressed vowels, in Spanish L1 and L2. L1 and L2 Spanish stressed /a/ and /e/ had higher F1 values than their unstressed counterparts. Only the L2 speakers showed evidence of rising offglides for /e/ and /o/. The L2 and L1 Spanish vowel space was compressed in the absence of stress. Lexical stress affected the vowel quality of L1 and L2 Spanish vowels. We provide an up-to-date account of the formant trajectories of Argentine River Plate Spanish word-final /a, e, o/ and offer experimental support to the claim that stress affects the quality of Spanish vowels in word-final contexts.