An Airflow Analysis of Spanish and English Anticipatory Vowel Nasalization among Heritage Bilinguals

Abstract

Gestural timing overlap between a vowel and subsequent nasal consonant results in the vowel being articulatorily nasalized. Research has shown that such degree of coarticulation varies cross-linguistically (e.g., English exhibits a greater gestural timing overlap than Spanish). This phenomenon has mainly been investigated in monolingual samples, and with only a small number of studies focusing on second and heritage language gestural timing patterns of nasality; the role of bilingualism in this respect is thus an open question, which is the focus of the current study. Sixteen second-generation US-born heritage bilinguals participated in this experiment. Their degree of bilingualism was assessed via the Bilingual Language Profile. They completed two separate read-aloud tasks: one in Spanish (heritage language) and one in English (second language). Simultaneous oral and nasal airflow were collected via pressure transducers from words that included phonetically oral and nasalized vowels. Results indicate that heritage bilinguals increment the degree of vocalic nasalization from Spanish to English. Nevertheless, their degree of bilingualism did not yield statistical significance in phonetic performance. The current study is the first one implementing aerodynamic methods with a heritage bilingual population and presents data for the possibility to possess two segment-to-segment timing strategies in heritage grammars.

The Role of (Re)Syllabification on Coarticulatory Nasalization: Aerodynamic Evidence from Spanish

“…The outcome in both conditions is gestural overlap with partial phonetic nasalization of the vowel. Cross-linguistic differences have been found with regard to the degree of gestural overlap across carryover and anticipatory, and within each type of process (see Beristain 2023aBeristain , 2023bClumeck 1976;Goodin-Mayeda 2016;Martínez 2021).…”

“…The author of the current study calibrated the equipment manually before every session by utilizing an AFTA6A Calibration syringe of 600 mL (Beristain 2023a(Beristain , 2023b and annotating the correction value of the signal for every word uttered and the surface area of the air volume expelled by the syringe. Those numbers were inserted in a calibration formula that was applied to the raw data of each participant.…”

“…Those numbers were inserted in a calibration formula that was applied to the raw data of each participant. The conversion equation used is presented in (1) (Beristain 2023a(Beristain , 2023bShosted 2009), as follows:…”

“…In Praat, data were segmented and annotated by inspecting the nasal airflow, oral airflow, and audio signals. The onset of the first vowel (V1) was located after the visible burst of air of /t/ decreased and a more periodic signal was present both in the oral airflow and audio signals, indicating vowel periodicity (see Beristain 2023aBeristain , 2023bDelvaux et al 2009). The amplitude of the spectrogram was also a clear cue for distinguishing the vowel from contiguous consonants, both oral and nasal.…”

“…Remarkably, the effect of (re)syllabification of nasal consonants on neighboring vowels in Spanish has not been thoroughly investigated, especially via articulatory methods. The present study seeks to understand the aerodynamics (Beristain 2022(Beristain , 2023a(Beristain , 2023bCohn 1993;Huffman and Krakow 1993;Shosted 2009;Shosted et al 2012;Solé 1992;Stoakes et al 2020) of the spread of anticipatory and carryover coarticulatory nasalization across various syllabic contexts within word boundaries and across word junctures. The study determines that tautosyllabic segments show greater articulatory overlap and that carryover nasalization is unaffected by resyllabification, which provides evidence for complete resyllabification.…”