The Effects of Language Dominance in the Perception and Production of the Galician Mid Vowel Contrasts

Abstract

Aims: This study investigates the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts by 54 early Spanish-Galician bilinguals in the cities of Vigo and Santiago (Galicia, Spain). Empirical data is provided to examine the role of language dominance in the perception and production of Galician mid vowel contrasts in order to determine whether the Galician vowel system is becoming more Spanish-like as a result of extensive contact with Spanish in urban areas. Methods: Perception and production data for each mid vowel contrast were collected in (1) binary forced-choice identification tasks, (2) AX discrimination tasks and (3) a reading-aloud task. Results: Results from binary forced-choice identification and AX discrimination tasks indicate that Spanish-dominant bilinguals have great difficulty in discriminating between these mid vowels while Galician-dominant subjects display a robust categorical identification of the two mid vowel categories. Acoustic analyses of their productions show that Galician-dominant bilinguals implement a Galician-specific /e/-/ɛ/ contrast but Spanish-dominant ones produce a single, merged Spanish-like front mid vowel. However, both language dominance groups seem to maintain a more robust /o/-/ɔ/ contrast. This asymmetry between front and back mid vowels is found in the productions of both language dominance groups. Conclusion: These results show that language dominance is a strong predictor of the production and perception abilities of Spanish-Galician bilinguals, and that only Galician-dominant subjects in these urban areas possess two independent phonetic categories in the front and back mid vowel space.

Variation in the lexical distribution and implementation of phonetically similar phonemes in Catalan

“…Pillai scores are an output of a multivariate analysis of variance, which are used to indicate the degree of merger or distance between two clouds of data points (Amengual & Chamorro, 2015;Hall-Lew, 2010;Hay, Warren, & Drager, 2006). Pillai scores for each speaker were based on normalized data, for /e ɛ/ and /o ɔ/ separately, where vowel height was determined by SpeakerV.…”

“…Factors included in the multivariate analysis were vowel type (high mid or low mid), consonantal context (dental or labial), syllable structure (CV or CVC), and syllable count (2 or 3). Given this range of variables, a high Pillai score (with an accompanying small p-value) indicates a significant distance, or lack of merger, between the two vowel types; a small or insignificant Pillai score suggests a merger (Amengual & Chamorro, 2015;Sloos, 2013). We also determined the extent to which Pillai scores correlate with BLP scores using Pearson's product-moment correlation tests.…”

Arabic-Spanish Language Contact in Puerto Rico: A Case of Glottal Stop Epenthesis

“…The effect of language dominance in phonetic transfer has been attested in several studies, including Broselow (1984), Simonet (2011Simonet ( , 2014 and Amengual and Chamorro (2015). Broselow (1984) shows the role of dominance in a study on the effects of L1 constraints on L2 production and perception of syllabification in Arabic-English bilinguals.…”

Sibilant Merger in the Variety of Basque Spoken in Amorebieta-Etxano

“…Following Amengual and Chamorro [14], participants were classified as Basque dominant or Spanish dominant depending on their BLP scores. More precisely, those participants that had a negative score were coded as Spanish dominant, and those that had a positive score were coded as Basque dominant.…”

“…Furthermore, these scores are based on the detailed evaluation of the four factors mentioned above and they capture the linguistic reality of speakers better than other approaches based on only one or two factors, as they do not rely only on speakers' linguistic proficiency or language use. Several studies have successfully used the BLP to measure language dominance among bilinguals of Spanish and another language, including Baird [12], Coetzee et al [13], and Amengual and Chamorro [14].…”