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The primary goal of this guide is to teach you how to first hear, and eventually replicate, proper Spanish pronunciation. Each section below contains audio exercises designed to help you to practice specific aspects of Spanish pronunciation. Simply reading through this guide without taking the time to complete the audio exercises will likely do ...
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word-initially (vs. word-internally) and that exhibit a back-to-front (vs. front-to-back) order of constriction location. Their explanation for these patterns is as follows. First, word onsets are potential utterance onsets, in which case no preceding vowel is available to provide formant transitions
Download Free PDF. Download Free PDF. The role of selective attention in the acquisition of English tense and lax vowels by native Spanish listeners: Comparison of ...
- Alexander Francis
Values of phonetic symbols are defined in terms of a variety of primarily articulatorily defined phonetic dimensions as in (2). A diphthong is a sequence of vowel-like elements – vowels and glides – in one syllable. The three most important properties for defining vowels are height, backness, and roundness.
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- /v/
- /R/
- /j/ and / ʤ/
- /s/ + Consonant in Word Initial Position
- Vowels
Sounds like /v/ that don’t exist in Spanish are always tricky. To further complicate things, the Spanish alphabet contains both the letters “b” and “v”, which a few centuries ago represented two different sounds, but today both are pronounced as the same phoneme. Consequently, Spanish speakers tend to produce the Spanish /b/ sound for both letters....
Second language learners tend to transfer their own sound system to the new language. For Spanish speakers, a good example is the English /r/ sound, which is often substituted by either the tapped or trilled Spanish /r/ sounds. In my experience, students will get to grips with /r/ at the beginning of words at lower levels, but at higher levels they...
/j/ is the sound we make at the beginning of “you;” /ʤ/, the sound we make at the beginning of “jazz.” To English speakers, these are completely separate sounds, but in Spanish they are allophones, which means they are perceived as two versions of the same sound. This means that Spanish learners are bound to not only have trouble producing /j/ and ...
In Spanish, there are no words that start with /s/ plus another consonant, but in English this consonant cluster is very common: “start,” “school,” “Spanish,” etc. At least in Spain, where I teach, students seem to invariably insert a vowel at the beginning of these words. In my experience, my students are quite capable of pronouncing a word like “...
Now we will turn our attention to vowel sounds. In general, these are harder to teach than consonants, because we can’t refer to any specific points of contact where the sounds are articulated in the mouth. English vowels are particularly troublesome for Spanish speakers, because Spanish, like Japanese and other languages, has only five pure vowel ...
20 possible pronunciations. English lax vowels, for example the schwa, are difficult for Spanish speakers to reproduce. Spanish speakers need to expand their range of vowel sounds. S-consonant cluster at the start of a word Words that start with s-in English are difficult to pronounce for Spanish speakers, who will start those words with es ...
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certain vowel in a certain syllable. The principles governing stress in Spanish are as follows: 1) If a word ends in a vowel, n, or s, the default stress falls to the penultimate (i.e., second-to-last) syllable. ex: mer-CA-do 2) If a word ends in any consonant other than n or s, the default stress falls to the ultimate (i.e., last) syllable.
