Manifestations of /bdg/ in Heritage Speakers of Spanish

Inspired by the relatively sparse amount of previous work on heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology, this study examined the intervocalic productions of /bdg/ in the read and spontaneous data of eight participants between the ages of 18-21, each of whom was classified as a regular speaker, a childhood speaker, a childhood addressee or a speaker with minimal exposure to Spanish (cf. Oh & Au, 2005). An acoustic analysis of the data revealed a three-way allophonic classification of all relevant tokens: pure approximants, tense approximants and stops (cf. Martínez Celdrán, 1985, among others). Mixed-effects models were run to analyze the effects of phoneme, syllable stress, task, and word position, as well as interactions between these variables, on the realizations of /bdg/. The statistical results showed that the native-like pure approximants appeared at a significantly lower rate in /b/, in stressed syllables, at word boundaries, and in the reading task. The phoneme /b/’s interactions with the word boundary and spontaneous task variables generated a significant decrease and increase in pure approximants, respectively. When /b/ corresponded with the grapheme <v>, tense approximants were at their highest rate, but they were significantly lower in the spontaneous task. A significant interaction between these two variables informed us that /b/<v> reduced its tense approximant rate in the spontaneous task. Stops namely exhibited opposing significant main effects and interactions when compared to pure approximants. Regarding individual differences, regular speakers’ productions resembled native-like patterns, while highly variable patterns were present across the other three speaker classes, suggesting that a consistent connection with Spanish well beyond childhood is important for achieving target-like pronunciation in a heritage language as a young adult.