Mid vowels in Catalan spontaneous speech spoken by Twi speakers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1344/phonica.2019.15.23-49Keywords:
Spontaneous speech, Mid vowels, Twi speakersAbstract
In current societies there is the coexistence of different linguistic communities in the same social context due to a flow of migrants. Thomason (2011) talks about language contact when more than one language is spoken in the same place at the same moment. This contact can influence these languages creating certain interference between them. For this reason, we wanted to explore if there is phonetic transfer phenomena in mid vowels produced by Twi speakers in spontaneous speech in Catalan. In this study we have described mid vowels acoustically and we have compared our results with the ones obtained by Rius-Escudé (2015) in which central Catalan vowels in spontaneous speech were described. We have used the programme of phonetic analysis Praat to carry out the analysis of vowels. Our corpus is composed of 144 statements obtained through an interaction teacher-student. Results show that there are no significant differences between the mid vowels produced by Twi speakers in spontaneous speech in Catalan and the vowels of central Catalan analized by Rius-Escudé (2015). Therefore, we cannot talk about phonetic transfer. The most relevant differences are found in the production of [ɛ] and [e].
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