Our goal in the present study was to examine how observers identify English and Spanish from visual-only displays of speech. First, we replicated the recent findings of Soto-Faraco et al. (2007) with Spanish and English bilingual and monolingual observers using different languages and a different experimental paradigm (identification). We found that prior linguistic experience affected response bias but not sensitivity (Experiment 1). In two additional experiments, we investigated the visual cues that observers use to complete the language-identification task. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that some lexical information is available in the visual signal but that it is limited. Acoustic analyses confirmed that our Spanish and English stimuli differed acoustically with respect to linguistic rhythmic categories. In Experiment 3, we tested whether this rhythmic difference could be used by observers to identify the language when the visual stimuli is temporally reversed, thereby eliminating lexical information but retaining rhythmic differences. The participants performed above chance even in the backward condition, suggesting that the rhythmic differences between the two languages may aid language identification in visual-only speech signals. The results of Experiments 3A and 3B also confirm previous findings that increased stimulus length facilitates language identification. Taken together, the results of these three experiments replicate earlier findings and also show that prior linguistic experience, lexical information, rhythmic structure, and utterance length influence visual-only language identification.A large body of research has demonstrated that speech perception is multimodal in nature. In addition to the auditory properties of speech, the visual signal carries important information about the phonetic structure of the message that affects the perception and comprehension of the speech signal (see, e.g., Massaro, 1987;Sumby & Pollack, 1954;Summerfield, 1987). The visual aspects of speech have been shown to both enhance and alter the perception of the auditory speech signal for listeners with hearing impairment, as well as for normalhearing listeners (see, e.g., R. Campbell & Dodd, 1980;Hamilton, Shenton, & Coslett, 2006;Kaiser, Kirk, Lachs, & Pisoni, 2003;Lachs, 1999;Lachs, Weiss, & Pisoni, 2002;Summerfield, 1987).In their seminal study of audio-visual speech perception, Sumby and Pollack (1954) showed that the addition of visual information dramatically improved speech intelligibility at less favorable signal-to-noise ratios in normal-hearing listeners. When presented with degraded auditory signals, the observers experienced large gains in intelligibility of speech signals in the auditory-visual conditions relative to the auditory-only conditions. The contribution of Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to R. E. Ronquest, Speech Research Laboratory, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-1301 (rr...

This paper overviews what we currently know about the phonetics/phonology of heritage speakers of Spanish based on previous research on this topic, and also provides suggestions for future directions to pursue, as inspired by previous work on heritage Spanish, adult learners of Spanish, native Spanish, and other heritage languages. Specifically, we examine the past and future of heritage Spanish phonetics/phonology at both the segmental (i.e., consonants and vowels) and suprasegmental (i.e., intonation, rhythm, stress) levels in terms of how this part of heritage Spanish grammars differs from that of other Spanish-speaking populations. Finally, we discuss a series of methodological factors to consider as investigators continue to advance this area of linguistic inquiry.

While recent studies of Spanish vowels produced by heritage speakers of Spanish (HSS) have revealed important differences in acoustic distribution and unstressed vowel reduction in comparison to monolingual norms (Alvord & Rogers, 2014; Boomershine, 2012; Ronquest, 2013; Willis, 2005), the influence of speech style on vowels produced by HSS remains relatively unexplored. Previous research examining stylistic variation in monolingual and bilingual varieties of Spanish report vowel space expansion in controlled speech relative to spontaneous speech (Alvord & Rogers, 2014; Harmegnies & Poch-Olivé, 1992; Poch-Olivé, Harmegnies, & Martín Butragueño, 2008) and increased vowel duration (Bradlow, 2002), although many of these studies included a small number of participants or did not examine the entire vowel system. The present investigation extends previous research by including a larger number of speakers and three novel tasks, as well as examining the effects of style on both quality and duration throughout the system as a whole. Acoustic and statistical analyses confirmed an overall vowel space expansion effect in controlled speech similar to that reported in previous studies, although not all vowels varied equally and along the same dimensions. Furthermore, vowel duration exhibited less variation than expected and was limited to the lowest vowels, suggesting that vowel quality and duration may be affected independently of one another. Combined, the general results not only reveal that speech style has a similar impact on vowels produced by HSS and other bilingual and monolingual populations, but also emphasize the importance of analyzing the entire vowel system on multiple dimensions.

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