A sociophonetic approach to the acquisition of Spanish rhotics in a bilingual community

Abstract

This study explores Spanish-English bilingual children’s acquisition of Spanish rhotics. The children’s productions are compared to a group of Spanish-English bilingual adults who represent the Spanish spoken in the same community: Albuquerque, New Mexico. In their narrations of a wordless picture-book, both children and adults produce more non-canonical than canonical variants. Binary logistic regressions run on 817 rhotics produced by 21 children, ages 3-9-years-old, and 6 adults demonstrate that non-canonical variants, instead of canonical variants are more likely to occur as Spanish use increases and in word medial position. The results point towards the propagation of a working change in Spanish rhotics that sees both articulatory and sociolinguistic motivations. Implications for research on phonetic-phonological development are also discussed