Abstract
- A variable rule analysis was conducted to assess the effect linguistic and social factors may have on the pronunciation of [θ] among American study abroad participants in Spain. The results indicated that gender exerted the strongest effect on the variability in the data, with females favoring [θ] and males strongly disfavoring this pronunciation. The findings suggest that social as well as linguistic factors may play a role in promoting the use of theta and that explicit instruction in sociolinguistic norms, in addition to pronunciation instruction, may be necessary for students to adopt geographical features that differ in prestige between a learner's native and target language.