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Fine-grained and probabilistic cross-linguistic influence in the pronunciation of cognates: Evidence from corpus-based spontaneous conversation and experimentally elicited data

  • Esther L. Brown EMAIL logo and Mark Amengual
Published/Copyright: April 29, 2015

Abstract

The present study examines variable realizations of Spanish word-initial voiced and voiceless dental stops in Spanish-English cognate pairs. Employing a variationist approach to naturalistic data, we report significantly decreased likelihood of reduced articulations of word-initial /d/ in cognates in spontaneous bilingual Puerto Rican discourse, and no such probabilistic effect for cognates in monolingual Spanish of the same speech community. Using experimentally controlled elicited data of Spanish word-initial /t/, we also find evidence of significant fine-grained effects of English on the articulations of Spanish cognates in the form of lengthened VOT for Spanish-English bilinguals. These results indicate that cross-language lexical connections affect phonetic categories in the speech production of Spanish-English bilinguals. It is proposed that both fine-grained and probabilistic effects of the phonology of one language on another can be explained within the Exemplar Model of Lexical Representation.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on our work. We would also like to thank the experiment participants, as well as Alex Mcallister for help with initial coding of the conversational data.

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