Who’s motivated to trill? A sociolinguistic study on the acquisition of Spanish trills in heterosyllabic sequences

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Santiago Arróniz
Mackenzie Dawn Coulter-Kern

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of trills in heterosyllabic sequences by speakers of Spanish as a second language (L2) and heritage speakers. To this end, we presented participants with three oral production tasks designed to elicit instances of trills, accompanied by a motivation questionnaire and a background questionnaire. The results obtained by means of acoustic analysis of the productions together with the answers to the motivation questionnaire show clear acquisitional patterns in L2 learners of Spanish at varying levels of proficiency, as well as variation in native speakers’ production of the trill in heterosyllabic sequences. This paper also raises some pedagogical implications, pointing out that instructors should more explicitly teach and illustrate examples of trills in heterosyllabic sequences at all levels, since this phenomenon is neither orthographically salient nor frequent in speech.

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