Perception of the contrast full vowel/schwa in English by trained Spanish learners
نویسندگان
چکیده
1 Introduction English is a stress-timed language displaying phonological vowel reduction: weak vowels, such as schwa (.ə.(, are part of the phonological form of many words in the language (mother .ˈmʌðə., banana .bəˈnɑːnə.(Furthermore , English allows important weakening processes in function words (prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs and conjunctions), in which peripheral vowels are often centralized to schwa. Speakers of languages such as Spanish, in which vowel lenition is only slight and not phonological, can find difficulties in perceiving and producing vowel reduction.
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