Dynamics of the Spanish vowels in contact with Catalan

© 2016 Arco Libros S.L. All rights reserved. The aim of this work is to determine the relationship between the acoustic characteristics of the Spanish vowels pronounced by Catalan and Spanish bilingual speakers and the fact that the speakers use both languages with a different percentage. Six speakers have been recorded: two of them who speak more Spanish than Catalan in their daily life, another pair of speakers who speak more Catalan than Spanish and, finally, another pair of speakers who use both languages, Catalan and Spanish, in a similar way. The first two formants of the Spanish vowels have been analysed in a corpus of spontaneous speech and in a list of words in order to study if the acoustic characteristics of the vowels depend on the style of speech.