Variable /s/-voicing by heritage Spanish speakers in the United States

Résumé fourni par la source

This chapter examines the variable voicing of coda /s/ in the speech of heritage speakers of Spanish living in the United States. Specifically, the chapter presents data from acoustic analyses of a production study in which both heritage and L1 speakers of Mexican Spanish were asked to read passages with words containing syllable-final and word-final /s/ in different voicing contexts (before voiced and voiceless consonants) and stress positions (before, in, or following the stressed syllable). The researchers found variable realizations of /s/ before both voiced and voiceless consonants among both groups of speakers, with no statistical difference among voicing rates for the two groups. The heritage voicing patterns were nearly identical to those found in L1 Mexican speech for all factors, including following consonant and stress position, and the individual variation found in the heritage speaker group was similar to that found in the L1 group, indicating that heritage Spanish speakers pattern like L1 speakers for this phenomenon. When compared to the results of L2 Spanish speakers in a similar production task (Schmidt 2014 ), it is clear that heritage speakers produce coda /s/ in a way that is similar to native speakers, unlike L2 speakers who rarely voice /s/ before voiced consonants.