Abstract
- This investigation addresses the question of whether native English-speaking adult learners of Spanish as a second language (L2), who are trained to measure the voice onset time (VOT) of stop phonemes using speech analysis computer software (waveforms and spectrograms), show significantly more improvement in the pronunciation of the Spanish stops--/p t k b d g/--in terms of reduced voice onset time (VOT) than do students who do not receive instruction in acoustic analysis. An experiment was conducted that compared the production of the Spanish stops in a sentence context of an experimental group of learners that received acoustic training with that of a control group. Acoustic and quantitative analyses of speech data extracted from both a pretest and a posttest were peformed, and the mean VOT values of the Spanish stops of both groups of learners were compared. The results revealed no significant differences in the reduction of VOT of the voiceless stops /p t k/ between the groups. However, a positive correlation between reduction in VOT and acoustic training was found for the voiced stops /b g/, although not for /d/. This finding provides some justification for the inclusion of acoustic training in college-level Spanish phonetics courses that aim to improve student L2 Spanish pronunciation.