| Summary: | <p> Several studies across various languages have shown that monolingual listeners perceive significant differences between the speech of monolinguals and bilinguals. However, these differences may not always affect the phoneme category as identified by the listener or the speaker; differences may often be found between tokens corresponding to unique phonological categories and, as such, be more easily detectable through acoustic analysis. We hypothesized that unshared English vowels produced by young Spanish-English bilinguals would have measurably different formant values and duration than the same vowels produced by young English monolinguals because of Spanish influence on English phonology. We did not find significant differences in formant values between the two groups, but we found that SpanishEnglish bilinguals produced certain vowels with longer duration than English monolinguals. Our findings add to the ever-growing body of literature on bilingual language acquisition and the perception of accentedness.</p><p>
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