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L2 perception of Spanish palatal variants across different tasks*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2013

CHRISTINE SHEA  and
JEFFREY RENAUD
CHRISTINE SHEA*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa
JEFFREY RENAUD
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa
*
Address for correspondence: Christine Shea, 412 Phillips Hall, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52240, USAchristine-shea@uiowa.edu
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Abstract

While considerable dialectal variation exists, almost all varieties of Spanish exhibit some sort of alternation in terms of the palatal obstruent segments. Typically, the palatal affricate [ɟʝ] tends to occur in word onset following a pause and in specific linear phonotactic environments. The palatal fricative [ʝ] tends to occur in syllable onset in other contexts. We show that listeners’ perceptual sensitivity to the palatal alternation depends upon the task and exposure to Spanish input. For native Spanish listeners, the palatal alternation boosts segmentation accuracy on an artificial speech segmentation task and also reduces latencies on a phonotactically-conditioned elision task. L2 Spanish listeners, on the other hand, only benefit from the palatal alternation in the second task. These results suggest that while Spanish L2 learners benefit from the presence of the alternation in linear phonotactic terms, this benefit does not carry over to a more abstract segmentation task.

Keywords

SpanishallophonesL2 phonologyspeech perception
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 203 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for recommendations on how to improve this manuscript. We would also like to thank participants at the University of Iowa and the Centro de Enseñanza Extranjera at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (CELE-UNAM) in Mexico City.

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