The current study investigated vowel quality in Miami Cuban Spanish, looking specifically at the influence of English on the Spanish vowel system. The vowel production of eleven Miami Cubans from three generations is investigated. Subjects include six males and five females. Three different elicitation instruments were used. The first was a brief sociolinguistic interview, the second was a story that the participants were asked to read aloud. Carrier words were embedded into the story in order to obtain multiple samples of both stressed and unstressed vowels. For the third instrument, subjects were asked to read a list of words with careful attention to their pronunciation. The reading list contained the same words that were embedded in the story of the first task. These three instruments were repeated in both Spanish and in English in order to investigate possible English influence in the Spanish vowel system of these bilinguals.

Although many studies have been carried out regarding the acquisition of Spanish as a second language, very few have focused on the acquisition of Spanish vowels. Studies that have compared the L2 production of Spanish vowels in learners who have spent an extensive time living abroad versus at home learners are scarce at best. The present study hopes to add to the literature by comparing the L2 pronunciation of the Spanish /a/ in these two groups using an acoustic analysis with the aid of speech-signal processing software and the inclusion of a native group for comparison. In addition, it hopes to provide insight into how these groups vary in their pronunciation of the Spanish /a/ in different tasks. Three tasks were administered—an oral interview, the reading of a short story, and the reading of a word list—whose range varied by less formal to more formal, respectively. The tokens were analyzed using Praat to find the F1 and F2 value at the midpoint of each. The results indicate that those who lived in a Spanish-speaking country for an extensive period of time (RM) demonstrated a significant difference (p<0.05) between their production of the Spanish stressed /á/ and the unstressed /a/ in the oral interview and short story tasks, but did not show a significant difference in the more formal word list task. The at-home (AH) group, who had spent no more than three weeks in a Spanish-speaking country, displayed a significant difference (p<0.05) between the two tokens in all three tasks. It was found that the RM group displayed a significant difference (p<0.05) in F2 values between it and the native speaker (NS) group in one of the tasks, indicating that language transfer was present in both its stressed and unstressed tokens of the Spanish /a/. Interestingly, the native Spanish-speaking group also displayed a significant difference (p<0.05) between its production of the stressed /á/ and the unstressed /a/ in the short story task.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the phonetic production of fricatives across differing word positions and task types. Further knowledge about the fricative production of second language learners of English would potentially improve the ability to teach correct pronunciation and improve the productivity of second language programs. All participants in this study were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese with English as their second language. A total of 12 subjects participated, all of whom had English proficiency ratings ranging from novice to advanced. The speakers were between 21-51 years of age, with each speaker having between 2 to 6 years of experience learning English in their country of origin. Using acoustic and spectral moment analyses, the acoustic nature of four types of fricative productions (/f/, /θ/, /s/, and /ʃ/) were analyzed as a function of linguistic task type and word position. Although a number of measures were found to differ significantly as a function of word position and task type, the majority of statistical analyses were not found to be significant. This lack of significance may be due to the specific methodology used, the speakers atypical voicing patterns, and/or decreased length of sound productions. Findings of this study may indicate that second language learners production of fricatives vary minimally across differing word positions and task types.

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