Acquisition of sociophonetic variation

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates the acquisition of nativelike variation in the production of Spanish /d/ by English-speaking learners. Specifically, we examine the production of /d/ in word-internal intervocalic position in the speech of 13 highly advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and 13 native speakers (NSs) of Spanish in digitally-recorded sociolinguistic interviews. The analysis includes a discrete categorization of /d/ realization based on spectrographic examination (stop vs. spirant vs. deleted) and a continuous intensity difference measure. Tokens were coded for grammatical category, surrounding segments, stress, number of syllables, and lexical frequency. Results indicate that both NNSs and NSs exhibit /d/ spirantization and deletion, but these two processes are affected by different factors both between and across groups: NNS deletion patterns are predicted most significantly by lexical frequency, whereas degree of spirantization is influenced by articulatory/contextual factors of phonetic context and stress. NS patterns for both processes are influenced by most factors in a similar manner.