A CROSS-DIALECT COMPARISON OF PENINSULA- AND PERUVIAN-SPANISH VOWELS

Geoffrey Stewart Morrison1 & Paola Escudero2
1Department of Cognitive & Neural Systems, Boston University; 2Institute of Phonetic Sciences, University of Amsterdam

ID 1006
[full paper]

A comparison was made of the acoustic properties of Spanish vowels produced by monolingual Spanish speakers from Spain and Peru. Monophthongs were produced in sentence final position. Peninsula speakers’ vowels were shorter, had lower fundamental frequency, and were more likely to be produced with creaky voice. A multivariate test on the whole vowel system did not find a significant cross-dialect difference in formant values. Implications for second-language speech perception and production research are discussed.