ENGLISH SPEAKERS’ PERCEPTION OF BILINGUAL SPANISH-ENGLISH SPEECH: ANALYZING THREE PHONETIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGLISH AND SPANISH

The debate on how bilingual and monolingual speech differs has been ongoing since the creation of linguistics as a scientific field. In this thesis, Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual speech will be investigated regarding three phonetic differences that exist between English and Spanish. The second experiment of this study includes a perception task that investigates how monolinguals process the two groups’ speech and their attitudes towards both groups. Results of the two experiments indicate that VOT differences in the two languages it the most salient feature of the three investigated. Additionally, while naïve listeners can accurately distinguish monolingual speech, the same cannot be said with bilingual speech. Finally, listeners harbor positive and negative attitudes towards both groups, revealing a more complex picture of listener attitudes than what previous literature concluded.