Dialect Differences and the Bilingual Vowel Space in Peruvian Spanish
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Dialect Differences and the Bilingual Vowel Space in Peruvian Spanish Erin O’Rourke University of Pittsburgh 1. Introduction The quality of Spanish vowels is often described as being relatively stable across Spanish dialects compared to consonants. Quilis & Esgueva (1983) examined vowels in several varieties of Spanish in order to derive a composite description of Spanish vowel quality. Recent laboratory work by Morrison & Escudero (2007) further supports this view. Comparing vowels produced by male and female speakers from Madrid and Lima, significant differences in formant values were not found between the two dialects (with the exception of the second formant (F2) of the vowel /o/). However, Peninsular speakers did employ significantly longer vowel sequences than the Peruvian speakers. Shifts in vowel quality, nonetheless, are observed in a number of contexts. For example, Oliver (2007) observes word-final vowel raising of mid to high vowels (/e/>[i] and /o/>[u]) in Puerto Rican Spanish, a phenomenon also observed in Mexican and Peninsular varieties. In addition, mid vowels in hiatus are raised in diphthong formation ([e.o]>[jo]), for example in Colombian Spanish (Garrido 2007). In Andean Spanish, Delforge (2008) finds that unstressed vowels undergo devoicing as opposed to centralization. Willis (2008) also shows mid-vowel variation in Dominican Spanish, especially with atonic vowels, such that vowels /e/ and /o/ are not equidistant from /i/-/a/-/u/ in the vowel space but rather tend to overlap with the neighboring high vowels. In these examples, the vowel being altered is an unstressed vowel. In addition, Quilis (1993:170-178) describes a number of vowel-related phenomena found in different Spanish dialects, including instability in vowel quality, vowel deletion, labialization and vowel-laxing in word-final position. In cases of language contact, the stressed vowel itself may exhibit a distinct vowel quality. Guion (2003) compared the vowels produced by Ecuadorian Spanish and Quichua bilinguals and found a target-like five-vowel system to be more common with simultaneous, early and some mid bilinguals, compared to a three-vowel system produced by late bilinguals and some mid bilinguals. Acquisition research by Flege, Bohn & Jang (1997) showed that a speaker’s first language (L1) affected production and perception of English as a second language (L2) and that these affects were experience-dependent. Likewise, Baker & Trofimovich (2005) found for English and Korean speakers that the L2 vowels of late bilinguals were influenced by the L1 system, while the influence was bidirectional for early bilinguals. Chen (2007) also found L1 influence in vowel quality for Mandarin Chinese speakers learning Spanish. Last, in a study of Southwest Spanish speakers, Willis (2005) demonstrates regional vowel variation in a contact situation: the /a/ was found to be farther forward, similar to the /3/ in English, the back vowels /o, u/ were lower and the /u/ also more forward than previous descriptions of Mexican Spanish. In a similar approach, the present study of Peruvian Spanish provides a comparison between monolinguals of two different dialects, Lima and Cuzco, as well as a comparison between Quechua- * This paper has benefited from audience feedback at the 4th Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology conference held in the University of Texas at Austin, and from presentations at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Indiana University, Bloomington. However, any error in content or analysis remains the sole responsibility of the present author. © 2010 Erin O’Rourke. Selected Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology, ed. Marta Ortega-Llebaria, 20-30. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 21 Spanish bilinguals who learned both languages in the home (termed here Cuzco native bilinguals) and those who learned Spanish only after entering the school system (termed here Cuzco L2 Spanish speakers). The distribution of the vowel space is potentially different between languages in that while Spanish has five vowel phonemes /i, e, a, o, u/, Quechua is described as a having three vowel phonemes /i, a, u/ with mid vowels as allophonic variants appearing in the context of uvulars, e.g., [kusa] ‘happy’ vs. [qosa] ‘husband’ (Cerrón-Palomino 1994).1 The difference in vowel production and perception is evident in the use of the term ‘motosidad’ to characterize Quechua-accented speech in which the mid and high vowels are mixed in Spanish (e.g., [pilu] for pelo ‘hair’) (1994:45-46). Early evidence for such mixing can be found in colonial court documents written by Quechua-Spanish bilinguals (Rivarola 2000). Lipski (1994:321) notes that this neutralization between high and mid vowels is highly stigmatized, such that this behavior may serve as a social marker between groups since it appears at or above the level of awareness. The aim of the present study is to examine acoustic data in order to address the following research questions: (1) To what extent are regional differences observed in Peruvian Spanish vowels?, (2) Within the Andean region, are there differences in vowel quality according to knowledge of Quechua?, and if so, (3) Do Quechua-Spanish bilinguals organize their vowel space differently than Spanish monolinguals (e.g., in terms of spacing between vowel qualities or backness)? In a cross-linguistic analysis, Bradlow (1995) found English, an 11-vowel system, to occupy the same area as Spanish and Greek, both with 5-vowel systems when examining vowels in open syllables. However, Spanish and Greek still differed according to the location of formant values, with Spanish vowels being lower and farther front, suggesting a difference in ‘base-of-articulation.’ Therefore, in addition to potential differences in shape and size of the vowel space, the relative location of the vowel triangle will be noted. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: in section 2 methodology is presented, section 3 includes an overview of the results, section 4 provides a statistical analysis of the data, and section 5 gives a summary of the main research findings. 2. Methodology 2.1. Data set The data are taken from a read corpus of utterances that were part of a sentence elicitation task designed for a separate study on intonation. 2 Participants were given a set of index cards with questions and answers written on them. The cards were read once and then a second time in reverse order. From these utterances, words containing stressed vowels in open syllables were extracted. The database for this pilot study consists of 672 vowels (28 tokens x 2 productions x 12 speakers).3 In order to avoid segmentation difficulties, only monophthongs were included; also, words with a palatal segment preceding or following the vowel were not used. A minimum of 10 tokens per vowel were measured for each speaker. All words had penultimate stress (e.g., ¥vino, cer¥veza, ba¥nana, per¥sonas) except for tokens with /u/, which had antepenultimate stress.4 1 See Escobar (1978) for a description of the stages of acquisition of Spanish vowels by Quechua speakers. 2 For the intonation study, each participant was shown an index card that included a grid with the name of a person in the first column, the number of an apartment in the second column, marital status in the third column, the name of a product in the fourth column, and the name of a drink in the fifth column. The participant was asked to answer a series of questions based on the information on the card, such as where the person lived, what he or she sold or what the person’s favorite drink was. In preliminary testing participants were only given the questions and used the card to construct the answers. However, since participants sometimes gave one-word answers, the task was modified so that both the question and the related answer were written on the index card. The index card was still introduced prior to beginning the task in order to provide a context for the question-and-answer session. 3 This data set is comparable in size to prior work on Spanish vowels, such as Quilis & Esgueva (1983), also described in Quilis (1988:174-175), which was based on 660 vowels from 30 productions of the five Spanish vowels in both tonic and atonic positions as produced by 16 males and 6 females from Spain and Latin America. 4 The data for the vowel /u/ are based on the production of the word número, such that some additional vowel quality affects may be due to the surrounding nasals. Quilis (1993:166) notes the reduction in F1 for vowels appearing between nasals and in word-initial position. Likewise, Recasens & Espinosa (2006) consider vowels to 22 2.2. Measurement Measurements for each vowel were taken at the midpoint using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2008). The F1, F2 and F3 were extracted with a script in Hz (Lennes 2003), converted to the Bark scale and then normalized using the procedure described in Guion (2003, a.o.) in order to account for differences in vocal tract length among speakers. That is, for each speaker, a k-factor was calculated as a ratio of the average F3 value for /a/ (in Bark) for one specific speaker (S1) divided by the average for each individual speaker (Si). The k-factors for Lima and Cuzco speakers range from 0.97-1.11 (see Table 1A for normalization values used for each speaker). Then the F1 and F2 values for all vowels for each speaker were multiplied by the k-factor for that speaker. 2.3. Speakers The participants in this study are all male with post-secondary education between 20-39 years of age. Speakers were born and raised in the region in which they were recorded (either Lima or Cuzco respectively). The data are divided into four groups consisting of three speakers each.