Spanish is the second most-spoken language in the U.S., after English, and 17% of the country's population self-identify as Hispanic or Latino/a. A significant percentage of U.S.-Latinos are bilingual to different degrees. Most U.S.-born Latinos have Spanish as their heritage language, but are dominant in English. Given the demographic importance of this population and an increased awareness in the research community of the benefits of bilingualism, determining the linguistic competence of these heritage speakers of Spanish in their two languages is a socially-relevant topic of research.
Although heritage language acquisition is recently gaining more attention, research in this area is still very scarce. This dissertation will contribute to a better understanding of heritage speakers' linguistic system by examining their phonology, more specifically, the use of word- and sentence-level stress cues in the perception and production of Spanish by US Spanish heritage speakers. Although word stress is contrastive in both Spanish and English, it is realized differently in the two languages. Unlike English in which segmental cues (i.e., individual sounds like consonants and vowels) play a critical role in the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables, in Spanish the distinction occurs more on the suprasegmental level (i.e., pitch, amplitude, and duration). Therefore, studies have shown that English listeners experience great difficulty in perceiving stress in Spanish. Using a set of psycholinguistic experiments, this dissertation examines whether Spanish heritage speakers successfully attend to suprasegmental cues when they perceive Spanish stress. Moreover, Spanish heritage speakers' production will be acoustically analyzed to investigate whether they effectively use suprasegmental cues when they produce Spanish stress. Results between their perception and production will be compared to see whether different patterns are found in these two domains. Since it has been reported that heritage speakers grow up hearing the heritage language more frequently than speaking it, asymmetrical acquisition of perception and production is likely to occur. Spanish heritage speakers' performance will be compared to that of Spanish monolinguals and English second language learners of Spanish, in order to see whether Spanish heritage speakers differ from these two groups, and, if so, in which aspects and to what extent. Analyzing the ways in which heritage speakers may differ from monolingual speakers and second language learners will help determine the best methodologies to achieve balanced competence in two languages.
