Discrepancy between heritage speakers' use of suprasegmental cues in the perception and production of Spanish lexical stress

Abstract

This study investigates Spanish heritage speakers' perception and production of Spanish lexical stress. Stress minimal pairs in various prosodic contexts were used to examine whether heritage speakers successfully identify the stress location despite varying suprasegmental cues (Experiment 1) and whether they use these cues in their production (Experiment 2). Heritage speakers' performance was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals and English L2 learners. In Experiment 1, the heritage speakers showed a clear advantage over the L2 learners and their performance was comparable to that of the monolinguals. In Experiment 2, both the heritage speakers and the L2 learners showed deviating patterns from the monolinguals; they produced a large overlap between paroxytones and oxytones, especially in duration. The discrepancy between heritage speakers' perception and production suggests that, while early exposure to heritage language is beneficial for the perception of heritage language speech sounds, this factor alone does not guarantee target-like production.

Adaptive and selective production of syllable duration and fundamental frequency as word segmentation cues by French-English bilinguals

“…Interestingly, Kim (2019) found what can be seen as a consistent pattern of results while investigating the production and perception of Spanish lexical stress among heritage speakers (i.e., speakers who learned Spanish from birth, but now use it only at home and use English in all other contexts). Comparing their production to that of monolingual Spanish speakers and of English-L1 learners of Spanish, Kim (2019) found that heritage speakers' production of Spanish lexical stress patterns with that of English-L1 learners of Spanish and not with that of monolingual Spanish speakers. On the other hand, Spanish heritage speakers' perception of Spanish lexical stress matched that of monolingual Spanish speakers and not that of English-L1 learners.…”

“…These results cohere with those of Cutler et al (1992), who found an effect of language dominance among simultaneous bilinguals' use of prosodic cues in word/syllable spotting tasks. Moreover, these results demonstrate that the production of native-like F0 ratios in English is more variable than previously expected, and that native exposure to English is not sufficient to maintain native-like production of F0 in English if exposed to another language with different prosodic patterns (see Kim, 2019 for similar effects on Spanish lexical stress production.) Nonetheless, F0 production of the English-L1 speaker group (who learned English from birth and French only later in life) was not affected by their relative language dominance, which might give the impression that F0 production in their L1 was somewhat immune to influences from their L2.…”

“…Due to the variability in language proficiency and the complexity of some sentences, as well as our conservative trial inclusion criteria, there were, on average, 26.4 usable sentence pairs (out of 40) per participant, in which both sentences were produced without hesitations, pauses or other errors [standard deviation (SD) ¼ 6.2, Min ¼ 11, Max ¼ 39]. Of note, although the proportion of removed trials seems high, similar proportions are found in the literature using similar designs (Kim, 2019). Sections III A 1-III A 3 present the analysis of F0 and duration ratios separately, and how they are modulated by speakers' L1 and relative language dominance.…”

“…Because pauses are reliable word boundary cues in both English and French, they would not be informative with regard to how bilinguals adapt their prosody to their L2. Finally, removal of any one trial caused the removal of both sentences from the pair, to ensure an equal representation of both conditions in the analysis (see Kim, 2019 for similar trial inclusion criteria in a production task).…”

The missing link in Spanish heritage trill production

“…Compared to this, less research has been done in phonological domains, most likely given that positive effects of early exposure have been attested on heritage language pronunciation (Au, Knightly, Jun & Oh, 2002;Knightly, Jun, Oh & Au, 2003). Nevertheless, recent studies on heritage language phonology discuss the existence of a "heritage accent" (Au, Oh, Knightly, Jun & Romo, 2008;Lloyd-Smith, Einfeldt & Kupisch, 2020;Stangen, Kupisch, Proietti Ergün & Zielke, 2015) and found deviations from monolingual norms at both segmental (Amengual, 2012(Amengual, , 2016Elias, McKinnon & Milla-Muñoz, 2017;Godson, 2004;Kissling, 2018;Ronquest, 2013;Willis, 2005) and suprasegmental levels (Chang, Yao, Haynes & Rhodes, 2011;Colantoni, Cuza & Mazzaro, 2016;Henriksen, 2016;Kim, 2019;Kim, 2020). For instance, Au et al (2008) found that Spanish heritage speakers, regardless of whether they regularly used Spanish during childhood, sounded more native-like than late L2 learners, but when compared with non-heritage native speakers, their speech was perceived to have a stronger foreign accent.…”