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Schwarz-Acosta, Nikolai Andrés

The Caribbean varieties of Spanish have long been marginalized, with many aspects of Caribbean Spanish (i.e. /ɾ/ lateralization, /s/ deletion, intervocalic /d/ deletion, /l/ rhotacization, among others) socially stigmatized within the Spanish speaking community (Carter & Callesano, 2018). However, there has been little to no investigation into the processing effects of these variations. Simply, while community members may have negative social connotations with these pronunciation variants, does their presence affect intelligibility and word recognition? Previous work has shown that there are a number of factors affecting lexical processing, including but not limited to, familiarity (Floccia et al., 2006), associativeness (Perea & Rosa, 2002), gender (van Berkum et al., 2008), experience (Sumner & Samuel, 2009), and others. This study aims to investigate how listener level of experience affects word processing of /ɾ/ lateralization. /ɾ/ lateralization is the systematic change from /ɾ/ to [l] in coda position present in many varieties of Caribbean Spanish. /r/ lateralization is arguably one of the most salient features in Caribbean varieties of Spanish. Despite its commonplace occurrence, it is stigmatized across Spanish communities, often deemed a pronunciation error. To assess how listeners perceive this variation at the word level, in this study, I employ a lexical decision task to have listeners judge the lexicality of words excluding and including this variation. Afterwards, the participants are asked questions regarding their varying experiences with Caribbean varieties of Spanish. There was no direct evidence that dialectal experience affects speech processing, but the results show large individual differences in /ɾ/ lateralization.

Graduating Project

eng

2024-05-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88381

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/