Research Symposium

BIO

Hi!
My name is Rose Clermont and I am a first-year sophomore from Miami, Florida majoring in Public Health with a minor in Economics.

The Evolution of Spanish Vowel Perception

Abstract

This objective of this study is to examine the acquisition of Spanish vowels by English-speaking individuals who are learning the Spanish language. Studies have shown that stressed syllables play an important role in vowel perception, however, this is challenge for these English-speaking learners because in the English language, unstressed syllables are usually reduced acoustically and in duration (Byers, 2017). This study followed a similar methodology from Garcia de las Bayonas (2004) but with more diverse participants. Surveys were conducted online with male and female participants, both native and non-native Spanish speakers. Stimuli included stressed and unstressed vowels and Spanish words. In Discrimination Task 1, participants were exposed to words and nonce words in Spanish with four different vowel pairings. In Identification Task 2, participants were exposed to vowels from Spanish and English in isolation. Upon competition of this investigation there were several findings: (1) the accuracy rate was lower for unstressed vowels than for stressed vowels for Task 1, (2) the accuracy rate was higher for unstressed vowels than for stressed vowels for Task 2, (3) discriminating vowel pairs has various difficult levels depending on the vowels in Task 1, with the most difficult being the discrimination of vowels /o/ from /u/, (4) in Task 2, participants found the identification of vowels /e/ and /a/ most difficult, (5) lastly, there was a significant difference in the results for both tasks when the independent variable was the Bilingual Language Profile instead of group membership.

Keywords: Spanish, Vowels, Language, Stressed and Unstressed Syllables