Comparing native and non-native competence in Spanish: analysis of a speech sample (2013)

Undergraduates: Rebecca Jepson, Katie Gutt

Faculty Advisor: Patricia Aramal
Department: Romance Languages

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In order to compare non-native and native pronunciation of Spanish, we have made recordings of ourselves and also a native speaker from Puerto Rico, saying certain words with specific sounds that we wanted to examine. We used the computer program Praat, which is a free software for acoustic analysis designed by Paul Boersma at the University of Amsterdam. The program allows you to record yourself, and then displays the sound recording in a spectrogram, which is a visual representation of the properties of the sounds.

We have chosen the words ¿basta¿ and ¿sabado¿. We chose the word ¿basta¿ specifically because it includes a fricative [s]. It also has two stops [b] and [t], and two instances of the low central vowel [a]. We also chose the word ¿sabado,¿ because it includes a fricative and two approximants. We picked these two words because of the inclusion of the fricative in both words, and also to see how the approximants could possibly sound different when pronounced by a native speaker.

We found differences in the pronunciation of the vowels but not in the pronunciation of the consonants, as shown by the comparison between the spectrograms.