Current Projects

Second-language (L2) learners’ perception of lexical stress is shaped by the functional weight of acoustic cues in the first language (L1): The more important a cue is for recognizing L1 spoken words, the more listeners rely on it for perceiving L2 lexical stress (Tremblay et al., 2021), even if the same cue does not signal lexical stress in the L1 (Qin et al., 2017) or the L1 lacks lexical stress (Kim & Tremblay, 2021; Qin et al., 2017). What is less clear is how a highly weighted acoustic cue in the L1 impacts the perception of lexical stress in the L2 when the directionality of the cue differs between the two languages, and whether High-Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) can help listeners adjust this directional effect.

To answer these questions, we investigate the perception of English lexical stress by highly proficient Mexican Spanish L2 learners of English. English lexical stress is signaled primarily by vowel quality and secondarily by pitch and duration (Tremblay et al., 2021; Zhang & Francis, 2010). In contrast, Spanish lexical stress is not signaled by vowel quality cues, and pitch accents in Mexican Spanish are often post-tonic, leading to lower pitch on stressed syllables compared to unstressed syllables (contrary to English; Hualde & Prieto, 2015).

Participants completed Tremblay et al.’s (2021) cue-weighting stress perception experiment (e.g., desert-dessert) as pre- and post-tests, and HVPT on stress contrasts (e.g., record [n.] vs. record [v.]) over 8–10 days (eight 30-minute sessions) with explicit accuracy feedback. Preliminary results suggest that Spanish listeners rely less on vowel quality than English listeners and use pitch in an L1-like manner (low-high as desert, high-low as dessert). Use of vowel quality improves with English proficiency and training, but use of pitch does not, suggesting that learning new cues is easier than unlearning established ones.

References

• Hualde, J. I., & Prieto, P. (2015). Intonational variation in Spanish. In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in Romance (pp. 350-391). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Kim, H. & Tremblay, A. (2021). Korean listeners’ processing of suprasegmental lexical contrasts in Korean and English: A cue-based transfer approach. Journal of Phonetics, 87, 1–15.

• Qin, Z., Chien, Y.-F., & Tremblay, A. (2017). Processing of word-level stress by Mandarin-Speaking second-language learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38, 541–570.

• Tremblay, A., Broersma, M., Zeng, Y., Kim, H., Lee, J., & Shin, S. (2021). Dutch listeners’ perception of English lexical stress: A cue-weighting approach. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 149, 3703–3714.

• Zhang, Y., & Francis, A. (2010). The weighting of vowel quality in native and non-native listeners’ perception of English lexical stress. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 260–271.

The present study investigates the factors that influence Heritage Spanish speakers' production of the phone [v]: its corresponding orthography (“b” vs. “v”), the phonetic context in which it is produced (VCV vs. NCV, where V = vowel, C = consonant, N = /n/), and participants’ language dominance (Spanish vs. English). More specifically, this study seeks to determine whether, for these Spanish speakers, [v] contrasts with /b/ (hence, /v/) or is an allophone of /b/. Standard Spanish does not have /v/ but it has "v”—an orthographic form of /b/, which in turn has (at least) two allophonic realizations: [b] after nasals and pauses, and [β] elsewhere; [v] has been reported to be produced in some Spanish dialects in contact with languages that have /v/ (e.g., English; Hualde & Colina, 2014), especially in Spanish-English cognates (Davidson, 2019). However, phonological status of [v] in these Spanish speakers’ productions is unclear. 

Forty native Spanish speakers living in the US who varied in their dominance in English—as determined by the Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire (Gertken, Amengual, & Birdson, 2014)—completed a picture-naming task, a spelling task (to ensure that they knew how to spell the Spanish words tested), and a read-aloud task. The target words started with an orthographic “v” or “b” and were preceded by a feminine determiner (VCV, where [β] is expected)) or masculine determiner (NCV, where [b] is expected) (e.g., un bote, una bota, un velo, una vela). All words were disyllabic and stressed on the penultimate syllable. Participants were audio- and videorecorded while producing speech, and the words were coded for whether a [v] was produced based on the visual articulatory information provided by the videorecordings (Vergara, 2013).

The results revealed a marginal interaction between task and orthography, with a stronger effect of orthography on [v] productions in the read-aloud task than in the picture-naming task. The results also revealed significant three-way interactions (in both tasks) between orthography, phonetic context, and language dominance, with the effect of orthography being stronger in VCV contexts than in NCV contexts, and with that interaction being stronger in English-dominant speakers than in Spanish dominant speakers. The numerical results showed that the great majority of [v] productions were found only in the presence of orthographic “v” and only in VCV contexts, where [β] is expected. This was true for both Spanish-dominant and English-dominant speakers, but the effect was more accentuated in English-dominant speakers.

These results strongly suggest that Heritage Spanish speakers treat [v] as an allophone of /b/ (similarly to [β]) in the presence of an orthographic “v” in the target words. We propose that this orthographic effect is perceptually driven, revealing an important interaction between orthographic and phonological representations of bilinguals. 

References

• Davidson, J. (2019). La [v]ariebilidad sociofonética en el español de California: Social and linguistic underpinnings of the labiodentalization of /b/. Paper given at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, University of Texas at El Paso. 

• Gertken, L. M., Amengual, M., & Birdsong, D. (2018). Assessing language dominance with the Bilingual Language Profile. In P. Leclercq, A. Edmonds, & H. Hilton (Eds.), Measuring L2 proficiency: Perspectives from SLA (pp. 208-225). Tonawanda, NY: Multiliingual Matters.

• Hualde J. I. & Colina, S. (2014). Los Sonidos del Español. Cambridge University Press.  

• Vergara V. & Pérez, H. E. (2013). Estudio de la incidencia de la representación gráfica (escritura) en la producción del alófono labiodental [v] del fonema /b/. Boletín de Filología, 48, 119-128.

The Cue-Weighting Transfer Hypothesis states that listeners transfer their weightings of acoustic cues to lexical contrasts from the first language to the second language (Tremblay et al., 2021; Kim & Tremblay, 2021). Less clear is whether cue weightings also transfer from the dominant language to the non-dominant language, even when the non-dominant language is the first language. This study seeks to answer this question by investigating the production and perception of English lexical stress by English-dominant and Spanish-dominant Spanish speakers. Acoustic cues to English lexical stress include vowel quality (primary cue), duration (secondary cue), pitch (secondary cue) and intensity (secondary cue) (e.g., Tremblay et al., 2021). In contrast, vowel quality is not a cue to (Mexican) Spanish stress; duration has been deemed to be the primary cue to Spanish stress (e.g., Ortega-Llebaria & Prieto, 2009). 

English-dominant and Spanish-dominant Spanish speakers completed a read-aloud task and Tremblay et al.’s (2021) cue-weighting lexical stress perception task. In the production task, participants produced noun and verb minimal pairs differing in lexical stress (e.g., (a) PREsent vs. (to) preSENT) in the carrier sentence Mary says “___” again. In the perception task, they heard stimuli differing in lexical stress (e.g., DEsert vs. deSSERT) that varied in vowel quality and pitch (with neutralized duration and intensity), vowel quality and duration (with neutralized pitch and intensity), and pitch and duration (with neutralized vowel quality and intensity) along 7-step continua. 

The results show that English-dominant speakers relied more on vowel reduction than Spanish-dominant speakers in both production and perception, and Spanish-dominant speakers relied more on duration than English-dominant speakers in production but not in perception. These findings suggest that language dominance has an important effect on bilinguals’ production and perception of lexical stress contrasts.

References

• Kim, H. & Tremblay, A. (2021). Korean listeners’ processing of suprasegmental lexical contrasts in Korean and English: A cue-based transfer approach. Journal of Phonetics, 87, 1–15.

• Ortega-Llebaria, M., & Prieto, P. (2009). Perception of word stress in Castilian Spanish: The effects of sentence intonation and vowel type. In M. Vigário, S. Frota & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology: Interactions and interrelations (pp. 35-50). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

• Tremblay, A., Broersma, M., Zeng, Y., Kim, H., Lee, J., & Shin, S. (2021). Dutch listeners’ perception of English lexical stress: A cue-weighting approach. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 149, 3703–3714.

This project investigates Spanish and English question intonation among bilingual Heritage speakers of Spanish. Drawing on insights from previous research, the study explores how bilingual speakers utilize intonation strategies influenced by factors such as pragmatic conditions, language dominance, generational status, input variety, and geographic/societal contexts. Using the Autosegmental-Metrical model and the Tones and Break Indices (ToBI) framework, the project analyzes elicited question intonation patterns in both languages, aiming to uncover differences and similarities in suprasegmental features that shape bilingual accents. By comparing intonation data across Spanish and English, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of bilingual prosody in this unique borderland setting.