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

Undergraduates: Meagan Martin, Hayley Scholl

Faculty Advisor: Patricia Amaral
Department: Romance Languages

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This research is part of an individual project for the course Spanish Phonetics and Phonology and looks at the processes involved in the creation and articulation of speech. In order to gain a more detailed understanding of the basic processes involved in the production of speech, we recorded two words of Spanish and compared our pronunciation with that of a native speaker from Andalusia. We analyzed the words, ¿danza¿ and ¿taza¿ using the Praat software. This software allowed us to create a spectrogram of our words, comparing our pronunciation of each sound to the pronunciation of our native speaker. Both of our words included sounds that are occlusive ([d] from ¿danza¿ and [t] from ¿taza¿), a fricative ([θ]), and a low vowel ([a]). We are interested in analyzing both the articulation of the vowel sounds, and the articulation of the voiceless interdental fricative [θ] that our native speaker pronounces. Our preliminary analysis of our spectrograms when compared to the spectrogram of our native speaker, show that as non-native speakers we show a tendency to lengthen the vowel, holding it longer as we would in English instead of keeping it shorter, as is the case in the Spanish. As part of our project, we will also compare the F1 and F2 values for that vowel for the native and non-native pronunciations.