Discover the Sounds of Yucatan Spanish!
Join us for a presentation by Dr. Rebecca Ronquest from North Carolina State University! This talk will summarize Dr. Ronquest’s recent work on intrusive vowels in tautosyllabic /Cr/ clusters in Yucatan Spanish, exploring both the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that shape their frequency of occurrence and duration.
She will then take us to the next step in this fascinating research — an acoustic characterization of rhotics in YS — sharing preliminary results and uncovering how the quality of rhotics relates to vowel intrusion.
Overall, while the duration of intrusive vowels is similar across monolingual speakers of Spanish and Maya–Spanish bilinguals, the quantity (or frequency) of vowel intrusion connects to the frequency of true taps and continuant taps. And at this preliminary phase, bilingual speakers are trending toward fewer “canonical” rhotic variants, leading to a lower frequency of intrusive vowels in tautosyllabic /Cr/ clusters.