In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utterances is not totally foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite different function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance-final intonational phrases, where a pronounced tendency for down-stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from Italian. As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.

This paper revisits the hypothesis that Buenos Aires Spanish (BAS) early peak-alignment and downstep are the result of contact with Italian. In order to support the hypothesis, I compared BAS to other contact (Spanish-Guarani) and non-contact varieties. Overall results confirmed previous findings and crucially showed that BAS differs from other Argentine non-contact varieties in the shape of prenuclear and nuclear accents and in the relative duration of the stressed syllable. Additionally, BAS, as opposed to the Spanish-Guarani contact variety studied here, shows early peak alignment in prenuclear accents and a nuclear fall. As such, the patterns observed in BAS are specific to this variety and, for the time being, is reasonable to attribute them to contact with Italian.

Although there is consistent evidence that higher levels of processing, such as learning the form-meaning associations specific to the second language (L2), are a source of difficulty in acquiring L2 speech, no study has addressed how these levels interact in shaping L2 perception and production of intonation. We examine the hypothesis of whether access to contextual meaning increases the chances of first language (L1) influence on L2 intonation. To test this hypothesis, we compared the perception and production of sentential English focus by 27 advanced English language learners (n= 13 L1 Mandarin speakers;n= 14 L1 Spanish speakers) and 13 controls, through a series of tasks that promoted different levels of access to meaning. Results showed that L1 transfer was especially clear in Spanish speakers. Not only did they consistently differ from controls in their perception of focalized verbs and subjects, showing their L1 bias to perceive focus at the end of a sentence, but they were also the only group of speakers that inserted pauses after the focalized word, which showed strong L1 effects. Moreover, these L1 transfer effects were more obvious in contextualized tasks, which indicated that facilitating access to meaning by adding context increased L1 transfer effects on the perception and especially on the production of focus intonation.

Models such as Eckman's markedness differential hypothesis, Flege's speech learning model, and Brown's feature-based theory of perception seek to explain and predict the relative difficulty second language (L2) learners face when acquiring new or similar sounds. In this paper, we test their predictive adequacy as concerns native English speakers’ mastery of French /ʁ/ and Spanish /ɾ/. Based on an acoustic analysis of the learner data, we demonstrate that these three models do not account for the full range of variability nor for the developmental sequences attested, because they do not consider the degree of difficulty involved in the simultaneous mastery of multiple phonetic parameters across prosodic positions. Consequently, models of L2 phonological acquisition must not only integrate findings from markedness theory and speech perception but also incorporate phonetic constraints on production.

We compare the extent to which Spanish heritage speakers and long-term immigrants in the United States differ in their intonation of broad focus declaratives, and propose that the between-group variability is motivated by the specific language learning/literacy conditions of each group. Results from a phonetically balanced reading task and an elicited narrative revealed significant differences between the two groups in their realization of pitch accents in read speech but not in the narratives. These results suggest that less-controlled tasks are more representative of the bilingual status of adult bilinguals, and that metalinguistic tasks, such as reading aloud, should be implemented with caution, crucially among Spanish heritage speakers who are in a semi-diglossic situation in the United States.

This study employs electropalatography to investigate the implementation of nasal assimilation in two Spanish dialects (Argentinian and Cuban) that differ in the realization of word-final nasals as alveolar or velar. 5 speakers of Argentian and 3 speakers of Cuban Spanish were presented with various utterances containing nasals followed by labial, coronal, and dorsal stops and fricatives under two stress conditions. Results revealed that place assimilation of nasals was consistently accompanied by stricture assimilation. The process was generally categorical, that is, the final alveolar or velar nasal adopted the articulation of the following consonant. Nasal + fricative sequences, however, showed a somewhat different behavior: occasional blocking of nasal assimilation before non-coronals, consistent gradient nasal assimilation before coronals (Argentinian), or categorical/gradient strengthening of post-nasal obstruents (Cuban). Overall, the results are largely consistent with Honorof's (Articulatory gestures and Spanish nasal assimilation, Yale University Ph.D. dissertation, 1999) study of Peninsular Spanish and together provide evidence for dialect-specific grammars of assimilation, which nevertheless share certain general principles of gestural organization.