The acquisition of rhotics in onset clusters in L2 Spanish
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Argitaratua
2025-01-29
Carolina González
Christine Weissglass
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3519-121X
Christine Weissglass
Laburpena
This study examines the acoustic realization of rhotics in Spanish onset clusters in 10 native speakers and 25 second language learners (L2) with English as their L1. The comparison of rhotic manner, duration, and svarabhakti vowel occurrence shows partial evidence of English transfer in the L2 group, since fricative, retroflex approximant and coarticulated variants, common in English, account for almost 40% of realizations. Rhotics are also longer in the L2 group and svarabhakti vowels less frequent. Results also show that stop voicing and place of articulation impact rhotic realization in the L2 group. The examination of individual patterns shows that some L2 learners are in initial stages of rhotic acquisition, while others are approaching the native pattern.
Nola aipatu
González, Carolina, eta Christine Weissglass. 2025. «The Acquisition of Rhotics in Onset Clusters in L2 Spanish». Anuario Del Seminario De Filología Vasca "Julio De Urquijo" 57 ((1-2):395-416. https://doi.org/10.1387/asju.25959.
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References
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Blecua, Beatriz & Jordi Cicres. 2018. Rhotic variation in Spanish codas: Acoustic analysis and effects of context in spontaneous speech. In Mark Gibson & Juana Gil (eds), Romance Phonetics and Phonology, 21–47. Oxford: OUP.
Boersma, Paul & David Weenink. 2012. Praat: doing phonetics by computer. http://www.praat.org.
Bradley, Travis. 2020. Spanish rhotics and the phonetics-phonology interface. In Sonia Colina & Fernando Martínez-Gil (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Phonology, 237–258. London: Routledge.
Carley, Paul & Inger Mees. 2020. American English Phonetics and Pronunciation Practice. London: Routledge.
Chang, Yueh-chin, Jiaqing Hong & Pierre Hallé. 2007. English cluster perception by Taiwanese Mandarin speakers. ICPhS XVI. 797–800. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.514.684&rep=rep1&type=pdf (12/11/2023).
Cruttenden, Alan. 2014. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. London: Routledge.
Colantoni, Laura & Jeffrey Steele. 2007. Voicing-dependent cluster simplification asymmetries in Spanish and French. In Pilar Prieto, Joan Mascaró & Maria Josep Solé (eds.), Segmental and prosodic issues in Romance phonology, 109–129. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Colantoni, Laura & Jeffrey Steele. 2018. The Mixed Effects of Phonetic Input Variability on Relative Ease of L2 Learning: Evidence from English Learners’ Production of French and Spanish Stop-Rhotic Clusters. Languages 3(2). 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3020012.
Dalston, Rodger M. 1975. Acoustic characteristics of English /w, r, l/ spoken correctly by young children and adults. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 57(2). 462–469.
Eckman, Fred R., Abdullah Elreyes & Gregory K. Iverson. 2003. Some principles of second language phonology. Second Language Research 19(3). 169–208.
Edwards, Harold T. 2003. Applied Phonetics: The Sounds of American English. 3rd edn. San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc. (1st edn., 1992).
Elliott, Raymond. 1997. On the Teaching and Acquisition of Pronunciation within a Communicative Approach. Hispania 80. 95–108.
Espy-Wilson, Carol Y. 1992. Acoustic measures for linguistic features distinguishing the semivowels /w j r l/ in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 92(2). 736–757.
Face, Timothy. 2006. Intervocalic rhotic pronunciation by adult learners of Spanish as a second language. In Carol A. Klee & Timothy Face (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 7th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second Languages, 47–58. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Hammond, Robert. 2001. The Sounds of Spanish: Analysis and application. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Hecht, Barbara F. & Randa Mulford. 1982. The acquisition of a second language phonology: interaction of transfer and developmental factors. Applied psycholinguistics 3(4). 313–328.
Hualde, José Ignacio. 2014. Los sonidos del español. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Hurtado, Luz Marcela & Chelsea Estrada. 2010. Factors influencing the second language acquisition of Spanish vibrants. The Modern Language Journal 94. 74–86.
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Kissling, Elizabeth. 2013. Teaching pronunciation: Is explicit pronunciation instruction beneficial for FL learners? The Modern Language Journal 97. 720–744.
Ladefoged, Peter & Keith Johnson. 2011. A course in phonetics. 6th edn. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning (1st edn., 1984).
Lord, Gillian. 2005. (How) Can We Teach Foreign Language Pronunciation? On the Effects of a Spanish Phonetics Course. Hispania 88. 557–567.
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Major, Roy. 2001. Foreign accent: The ontogeny and phylogeny of second language phonology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Martínez Celdrán, Eugenio & Ana M.ª Fernández Planas. 2007. Manual de fonética española: Articulaciones y sonidos del español. Barcelona: Ariel Lingüística.
Massone, María Ignacia. 1988. Estudio acústico y perceptivo de las consonantes nasales y líquidas del español. Estudios de Fonética Experimental 3. 15–34.
Olive, Joseph, Alice Greenwood & John Coleman. 1993. Acoustics of American English Speech: A Dynamic Approach. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Olsen, Michael. 2012. The L2 Acquisition of Spanish Rhotics by L1 English Speakers: The Effect of L1 Articulatory Routines and Phonetic Context for Allophonic Variation. Hispania 95(1). 65–82.
Peng, L. & J. Ann. 2002. An alternative to stress placement: Unity in stress placement in English as second language. In Allan James & Jonathan Leather (eds.), New sounds 2000: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second-Language Speech, 27l–279. Klagenfurt, Austria: University of Klagenfurt.
Quilis, Antonio. 1993. Tratado de fonología y fonética españolas. Madrid: Gredos.
Ramírez, Carlos. 2006. Acoustic and perceptual characterization of the epenthetic vowel between clusters formed by consonant + liquid in Spanish. In Manuel Díaz-Campos (ed.), Selected Proceedings of the Second Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonetics and Phonology, 48–61. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Real Academia Española. 2011. Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Fonética y fonología. Barcelona: Espasa.
Reeder, Jeffrey. 1998. English speakers’ acquisition of voiceless stops and trills in L2 Spanish. Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education 3(3). 101–118.
Reetz, Henning & Allard Jongman. 2020. Phonetics: transcription, production, acoustics, and perception. 2nd edn. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell (1st edn., 2009).
Rose, Marda. 2010. Intervocalic tap and trill production in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 3. 379–419. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2010-1080.
Sacks, Norman P. 1962. A Study in Spanish Pronunciation Errors. Hispania 45(2). 289–300.
Salazar, Sergio. 2022. Rhotics in Costa Rican Spanish: An Acoustic Study. Tallahassee: Florida State University honors thesis. https://purl.lib.fsu.edu/diginole/FSU_libsubv1_scholarship_submission_1650656622_3f5de421 (2023/11/12).
Scarpace, Daniel. 2014. The Acquisition of the Tap/Trill Contrast Within and Across Words in Spanish. Concordia Working Papers in Applied Linguistics (Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech) 5. 580–596.
Schmeiser, Benjamin. 2006. On the Durational Variability of Svarabhakti Vowels in Spanish Consonant Clusters. Davis: University of California, Davis doctoral dissertation.
Schmeiser, Benjamin. 2019. Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Liquid Consonants. In Rajiv Rao (ed.), Key Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation: From Description to Pedagogy, 106–126. Routledge: London.
Schwegler, Armin, Juergen Kempff & Ana Ameal-Guerra. 2007. Fonética y fonología españolas. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
Tsuchida, Ayoko, Abigail C. Cohn, & Masanobu Kumada. 2000. Sonorant devoicing and the phonetic realization of [spread glottis] in English. Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 13. 167–181.
Waltmunson, Jay. 2005. The relative degree of difficulty of L2 Spanish /d, t/, trill and tap by L1 English speakers: Auditory and acoustic methods of defining pronunciation accuracy. Seattle: University of Washington doctoral dissertation.
Weissglass, Christine. 2015. The production of rhotics in onset clusters by Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Basque bilinguals. In Joaquín Romero & María Riera (eds.), The phonetics-phonology interface. Representations and methodologies, 193–209. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Wells, John. 2011. How do we pronounce train? (22/03/2011). John Wells’s phonetic blog. http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-do-we-pronounce-train.html (12/11/2023).
Zampini, Mary L. 1996. Voiced stop spirantization in the ESL speech of native speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics 17. 335–354.
Zampini, Mary L. 1997. L2 Spanish spirantization, prosodic domains, and interlanguage rules. In S. J. Hannahs & Martha Young-scholten (eds.), Focus on phonological acquisition, 209–234. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Zue, Victor & Martha Laferriere. 1979. Acoustic study of medial /t,d/ in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 66. 1039–1050.
Blecua, Beatriz. 2001. Las vibrantes en español: manifestaciones acústicas y procesos fonéticos. Barcelona: Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona doctoral dissertation.
Blecua, Beatriz & Jordi Cicres. 2018. Rhotic variation in Spanish codas: Acoustic analysis and effects of context in spontaneous speech. In Mark Gibson & Juana Gil (eds), Romance Phonetics and Phonology, 21–47. Oxford: OUP.
Boersma, Paul & David Weenink. 2012. Praat: doing phonetics by computer. http://www.praat.org.
Bradley, Travis. 2020. Spanish rhotics and the phonetics-phonology interface. In Sonia Colina & Fernando Martínez-Gil (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Phonology, 237–258. London: Routledge.
Carley, Paul & Inger Mees. 2020. American English Phonetics and Pronunciation Practice. London: Routledge.
Chang, Yueh-chin, Jiaqing Hong & Pierre Hallé. 2007. English cluster perception by Taiwanese Mandarin speakers. ICPhS XVI. 797–800. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.514.684&rep=rep1&type=pdf (12/11/2023).
Cruttenden, Alan. 2014. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. London: Routledge.
Colantoni, Laura & Jeffrey Steele. 2007. Voicing-dependent cluster simplification asymmetries in Spanish and French. In Pilar Prieto, Joan Mascaró & Maria Josep Solé (eds.), Segmental and prosodic issues in Romance phonology, 109–129. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Colantoni, Laura & Jeffrey Steele. 2018. The Mixed Effects of Phonetic Input Variability on Relative Ease of L2 Learning: Evidence from English Learners’ Production of French and Spanish Stop-Rhotic Clusters. Languages 3(2). 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3020012.
Dalston, Rodger M. 1975. Acoustic characteristics of English /w, r, l/ spoken correctly by young children and adults. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 57(2). 462–469.
Eckman, Fred R., Abdullah Elreyes & Gregory K. Iverson. 2003. Some principles of second language phonology. Second Language Research 19(3). 169–208.
Edwards, Harold T. 2003. Applied Phonetics: The Sounds of American English. 3rd edn. San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc. (1st edn., 1992).
Elliott, Raymond. 1997. On the Teaching and Acquisition of Pronunciation within a Communicative Approach. Hispania 80. 95–108.
Espy-Wilson, Carol Y. 1992. Acoustic measures for linguistic features distinguishing the semivowels /w j r l/ in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 92(2). 736–757.
Face, Timothy. 2006. Intervocalic rhotic pronunciation by adult learners of Spanish as a second language. In Carol A. Klee & Timothy Face (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 7th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second Languages, 47–58. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Hammond, Robert. 2001. The Sounds of Spanish: Analysis and application. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Hecht, Barbara F. & Randa Mulford. 1982. The acquisition of a second language phonology: interaction of transfer and developmental factors. Applied psycholinguistics 3(4). 313–328.
Hualde, José Ignacio. 2014. Los sonidos del español. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Hurtado, Luz Marcela & Chelsea Estrada. 2010. Factors influencing the second language acquisition of Spanish vibrants. The Modern Language Journal 94. 74–86.
IBM Corp. 2012. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, v. 21.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.
Kissling, Elizabeth. 2013. Teaching pronunciation: Is explicit pronunciation instruction beneficial for FL learners? The Modern Language Journal 97. 720–744.
Ladefoged, Peter & Keith Johnson. 2011. A course in phonetics. 6th edn. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning (1st edn., 1984).
Lord, Gillian. 2005. (How) Can We Teach Foreign Language Pronunciation? On the Effects of a Spanish Phonetics Course. Hispania 88. 557–567.
Major, Roy. 1986. The ontogeny model: Evidence from L2 acquisition of Spanish r. Language Learning 36(4). 453–504. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1986.tb01035.x.
Major, Roy. 2001. Foreign accent: The ontogeny and phylogeny of second language phonology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Martínez Celdrán, Eugenio & Ana M.ª Fernández Planas. 2007. Manual de fonética española: Articulaciones y sonidos del español. Barcelona: Ariel Lingüística.
Massone, María Ignacia. 1988. Estudio acústico y perceptivo de las consonantes nasales y líquidas del español. Estudios de Fonética Experimental 3. 15–34.
Olive, Joseph, Alice Greenwood & John Coleman. 1993. Acoustics of American English Speech: A Dynamic Approach. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Olsen, Michael. 2012. The L2 Acquisition of Spanish Rhotics by L1 English Speakers: The Effect of L1 Articulatory Routines and Phonetic Context for Allophonic Variation. Hispania 95(1). 65–82.
Peng, L. & J. Ann. 2002. An alternative to stress placement: Unity in stress placement in English as second language. In Allan James & Jonathan Leather (eds.), New sounds 2000: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second-Language Speech, 27l–279. Klagenfurt, Austria: University of Klagenfurt.
Quilis, Antonio. 1993. Tratado de fonología y fonética españolas. Madrid: Gredos.
Ramírez, Carlos. 2006. Acoustic and perceptual characterization of the epenthetic vowel between clusters formed by consonant + liquid in Spanish. In Manuel Díaz-Campos (ed.), Selected Proceedings of the Second Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonetics and Phonology, 48–61. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Real Academia Española. 2011. Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Fonética y fonología. Barcelona: Espasa.
Reeder, Jeffrey. 1998. English speakers’ acquisition of voiceless stops and trills in L2 Spanish. Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education 3(3). 101–118.
Reetz, Henning & Allard Jongman. 2020. Phonetics: transcription, production, acoustics, and perception. 2nd edn. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell (1st edn., 2009).
Rose, Marda. 2010. Intervocalic tap and trill production in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 3. 379–419. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2010-1080.
Sacks, Norman P. 1962. A Study in Spanish Pronunciation Errors. Hispania 45(2). 289–300.
Salazar, Sergio. 2022. Rhotics in Costa Rican Spanish: An Acoustic Study. Tallahassee: Florida State University honors thesis. https://purl.lib.fsu.edu/diginole/FSU_libsubv1_scholarship_submission_1650656622_3f5de421 (2023/11/12).
Scarpace, Daniel. 2014. The Acquisition of the Tap/Trill Contrast Within and Across Words in Spanish. Concordia Working Papers in Applied Linguistics (Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech) 5. 580–596.
Schmeiser, Benjamin. 2006. On the Durational Variability of Svarabhakti Vowels in Spanish Consonant Clusters. Davis: University of California, Davis doctoral dissertation.
Schmeiser, Benjamin. 2019. Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Liquid Consonants. In Rajiv Rao (ed.), Key Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation: From Description to Pedagogy, 106–126. Routledge: London.
Schwegler, Armin, Juergen Kempff & Ana Ameal-Guerra. 2007. Fonética y fonología españolas. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
Tsuchida, Ayoko, Abigail C. Cohn, & Masanobu Kumada. 2000. Sonorant devoicing and the phonetic realization of [spread glottis] in English. Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 13. 167–181.
Waltmunson, Jay. 2005. The relative degree of difficulty of L2 Spanish /d, t/, trill and tap by L1 English speakers: Auditory and acoustic methods of defining pronunciation accuracy. Seattle: University of Washington doctoral dissertation.
Weissglass, Christine. 2015. The production of rhotics in onset clusters by Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Basque bilinguals. In Joaquín Romero & María Riera (eds.), The phonetics-phonology interface. Representations and methodologies, 193–209. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Wells, John. 2011. How do we pronounce train? (22/03/2011). John Wells’s phonetic blog. http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-do-we-pronounce-train.html (12/11/2023).
Zampini, Mary L. 1996. Voiced stop spirantization in the ESL speech of native speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics 17. 335–354.
Zampini, Mary L. 1997. L2 Spanish spirantization, prosodic domains, and interlanguage rules. In S. J. Hannahs & Martha Young-scholten (eds.), Focus on phonological acquisition, 209–234. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Zue, Victor & Martha Laferriere. 1979. Acoustic study of medial /t,d/ in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 66. 1039–1050.
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