Comparison of Fundamental Frequency Between Spanish and English in Heritage Speakers of Spanish
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Date
2020-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
This study compares the fundamental frequency of English and Spanish in a heritage speaker of Spanish. The lack of research on the prosody of heritage speakers as well as the lack of research comparing a heritage speaker's own two languages were motivations for this study. A contextualized image description task was used to record declarative utterances in both English and Spanish. The utterances were analyzed for mean, minimum, and maximum pitch. It was found that across all participants, the difference in pitch between English and Spanish was not significant in the mean or minimum pitch, but the maximum pitch for Spanish was significantly higher than the maximum pitch for English. It was also found that when tested individually, the mean pitch was significantly different for certain participants. This correlated to the participants' method of second language acquisition (simultaneous) and their language dominance score on the Bilingual Language Profile. It is suggested that this correlation is due to the fact that simultaneous learners are able to keep their languages separate, while successive learners rely on their first language to learn their second, causing more interlanguage influence which may lead to more similar pitch between languages.
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Keywords
heritage, spanish, pitch, bilingual, frequency, prosody