Functional Constraints on Deletion of Word Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish

Effects of VV-sequence deletion across word boundaries in Spanish

Spanish does not allow vowel deletion in unstressed syllables the way languages like English do. However, it may occur in contexts of VV-sequences across word boundaries, under durational reduction in connected speech. This paper explores the effects of vowel deletion on the perception of [-high] vowel sequences on 8 native speakers of Peninsular Spanish. The results are then compared to the sp...

Syllable-final /s/ lenition in the LDC's callhome Spanish corpus

This paper describes a data corpus which is being made available through the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) that codes lenition of syllable-final /s/ in Latin American Spanish in the LDC’s CallHome Spanish corpus. This lenition is a process whereby the /s/ may be aspirated (pronounced [h]) or deleted altogether. Since syllable-final /s/ is frequent in Spanish, lenition has a great effect on o...

the effect of functional/notional approach on the proficiency level of efl learners and its evaluation through functional test

in fact, this study focused on the following questions: 1. is there any difference between the effect of functional/notional approach and the structural approaches to language teaching on the proficiency test of efl learners? 2. can a rather innovative language test referred to as "functional test" ge devised so so to measure the proficiency test of efl learners, and thus be as much reliable an...

Salvadoran Spanish /-s/ Aspiration and Deletion in a Bilingual Context

A joint model of word segmentation and phonological variation for English word-final /t/-deletion

Word-final /t/-deletion refers to a common phenomenon in spoken English where words such as /wEst/ “west” are pronounced as [wEs] “wes” in certain contexts. Phonological variation like this is common in naturally occurring speech. Current computational models of unsupervised word segmentation usually assume idealized input that is devoid of these kinds of variation. We extend a non-parametric m...