The Effect of English-Spanish Language Contact on North Midland /u/ Production

Abstract

Abstract Monolingually-raised English speakers in the North Midland region of the United States have been found to produce a centralized or fronted /u/, despite it not being a standard feature of the region. The production of this relatively novel sound in bilingual contexts, as is the case of English-Spanish bilingual communities in the Chicagoland area, is not currently well-understood. In order to examine the effect of language contact and phonetic transfer on bilinguals’ speech, 20 adult heritage speakers from the Chicagoland area were recorded while producing /u/ in English and Spanish. 20 formant values at equidistant points from these vowels were taken and then analyzed using a generalized additive mixed-effects model (GAMM). The results of the GAMM and its visualization showed that, overall, the heritage speakers produced a fronted /u/ when speaking English but maintained a backed production of /u/ when speaking Spanish. These results suggest that bilingual heritage speakers are participating in the sound change of the North Midland, while successfully separating its influence from their Spanish speech.