Chapter 9. Individual differences do not affect trill variation by advanced learners of Spanish

Abstract

The current study analyzed whether variation in trill pronunciation by advanced learners of Spanish is conditioned by individual differences in phonological short-term memory, executive working memory, second language vocabulary score, and years of study, as well as five linguistic variables. We found that none of the individual difference variables significantly affected variation, while surrounding phonetic context and lexical stress were important predictors of this variation. The findings suggest that these individual differences do not impact trill variation by advanced learners, possibly because these factors are more important at lower levels of proficiency, or because trill variability is largely impacted by phonetic factors due to the well-known articulatory difficulty of this sound.