On the status of the phoneme /b/ in heritage speakers of Spanish

Abstract

This study examined intervocalic productions of /b/ in heritage speakers of Spanish residing in the United States. Eleven speakers were divided into two groups based on at-home exposure to Spanish, and subsequently completed reading and picture description tasks eliciting productions of intervocalic /b/ showing variation in word position, syllable stress, and orthography. The mixed-effects results revealed that while both groups manifested three clear phonetic categories, the group with more at-home experience followed a phonological rule of spirantization to a pure approximant to a higher degree across the data. The less-target-like stop and tense approximant allophones appeared more in the reading task, in stressed syllables, and in the less experienced group. Word boundary position interacted with group and task to induce less-target-like forms as well. The findings emphasize the influence of language background, linguistic context, orthography, and cognitive demands of tasks in accounting for heritage phonetics and phonology.

Keywords

• heritage speakers
• spirantization
• Spanish
• phonetics
• phonology