Second Language Acquisition of Voicing Patterns in Spanish Sibilants

In the current study, English-speaking students enrolled in an upper-level university Spanish class read a series of sentences that are designed to elicit alveolar sibilants [s, z] in coda position, both word-internal and word-final. Samples are analyzed using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2005), and data analysis compares the duration of voicing of each sibilant to the total sibilant duration to determine the percentage of voicing assimilation. Given that voicing assimilation in native Spanish is variable rather than categorical (Romero 1999; Schmidt & Willis 2011; Garcia 2013), a control group of native speakers provides a comparison sample. Given the differences of the /s/ in English and Spanish, results are discussed comparing the production of the /s/ by native English speakers to the production of native Spanish speakers