(S3 is the non-native spanish speaker)

Spanish Vowel Duration

Compared to English, Spanish vowels are understood to be more uniform in length, while English vowels are weakened and lengthened with stress. This project was an attempt to investigate the “stress timing” and “syllable timing” distinction by comparing L1, L2, and bilingual speakers of Spanish. While overall the L2 speaker had more variation in length, all speakers showed variation regardless of L1 depending on other phonetic variables, revealing interesting interactions between prosody, transfer, and environment.

Predicting the Past

Have you ever noticed how “snuck” … well … snuck into English and replaced “sneaked?” What other verbs are at risk of becoming irregular? If, hypothetically, cry were to fall victim , what would its past tense be? Luckily, we don’t have to speculate anymore! Some Reddit users have proposed options based on other irregular verbs, like in these meme that had people arguing whether the past tense would be crew or crode. But what about crove and crid? If cry and fly are more similar to each other than cry and drive, in theory crew would be the easy choice. However, things get more complicated when developing a full paradigm.