Syllabe Contraction in Spanish dialects and B2 level Hungarian leaners of Spanish

Abstract

In this study, we analyze the so-called “syllable contraction”, that is, the reduction of a sequence of two identical vowels to the duration of a single sound, across word boundaries. We investigate the phenomenon in the semi-spontaneous speech of speakers of the following dialects of Spanish: Madrilenian, Andalusian, Mexican and Rioplatense. Furthermore, we compare their results with the oral (also semi-spontaneous) production of B2 (CEFR) level Hungarian learners of Spanish. We raise the following research hypotheses: (i) syllable contraction is a common phenomenon in all of the four analyzed dialects; however, (ii) it does not appear (or only occasionally) in the speech of the Hungarian learners. For our analysis, we used fifty recordings (interviews) of ninety-nine minutes in total, and we examined them in the phonetic-acoustic software Praat. Our results support both of the hypotheses partially: (i) syllable contraction appears in all of the analyzed dialects, but only in less than half of the cases; (ii) although the phenomenon appears in the oral production of the Hungarian learners, we found only one example of syllable contraction in the Hungarian informants’ speech.

Keywords

• Dialects
• Oral production
• Syllable contraction
• Teaching Spanish as L2
• Vowel reduction