Influence of orthography in production and perception of /b/ in US Spanish

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of orthography and language profile on Spanish-English bilinguals’ production and perception of intervocalic /b/. We hypothesize more labiodental productions of /b/ and weakened discrimination of allophones to be correlated with the grapheme . We also hypothesize that early bilinguals will have more labiodental productions and weaker discrimination of the allophones. Results of a production and discrimination task indicate that is correlated to higher relative intensity in the production task and lower discrimination accuracy in the perception task, regardless of the degree of exposure to English. These results advocate for a usage-based model of language representation.

Keywords

• Perception
• Bilingualism
• Allophones
• Ortography
• US Spanish