The Influence of Language Dominance on the Production of English Mid-central Vowels by Spanish-Majorcan Bilinguals

Abstract

[eng] This paper examines whether the production of English /ɜ:/ and /ʌ/ by Spanish-Majorcan Catalan bilinguals is more accurate for those speakers dominant in Majorcan Catalan. It is widely known that Both Spanish and Catalan lack stressed mid-central vowels in their repertory, which makes it difficult for learners to attain them. However, the Balearic dialect does have one, /ə/. For this reason, 14 Majorcan residents who were experienced students of English enrolled in an English C1 level course were recorded reading 29 minimal pairs. These participants had previously answered a language background questionnaire and the Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire. Using the scores obtained in the latter, four groups were established: Catalan dominant; slightly Spanish dominant; moderately Spanish dominant; and clearly Spanish dominant. Then, by means of a Likert scale, their production was evaluated by three native English speakers and a non-native speaker of English expert in phonetics. Results evinced that there was no particular relation between dominance in Catalan and a better performance in English mid-central vowels pronunciation. However, there were many inconsistences in the production of these vowel sounds that might be attributed to the influence of speakers’ L1 strict correlation between spelling and pronunciation, the consequences of the rhotic quality of /ɜ:/ in the judges’ evaluation, the effect that minimal pair contrasts have on production, and the impact of personal linguistic experiences.