L2 PRODUCTION OF AMERICAN ENGLISH VOWELS IN FUNCTION WORDS BY SPANISH L1 SPEAKERS

摘要

Studies investigating the pronunciation of second language (L2) speakers have focused on the production of individual segments in stable environments (e.g., vowels in the stressed syllables of lexical words). As such, there is a need for further investigation into the L2 pronunciation of segments which are more variable and subject to phonetic and phonological processes. The present study addresses this gap by investigating the production of vowels in function words in American English (hereafter English) by native (L1) speakers of Spanish.