Maldonado-Valentin, Mirta

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Voice onset time for voiced and voiceless stops across English proficiency levels for sixteen Puerto Rican Spanish speakers at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
(2007) Maldonado-Valentin, Mirta; Dayton, Elizabeth; College of Arts and Sciences - Arts; Pratt, Ellen; Baker, Joan; Morales, Betsy; Department of English; Morales, Alfredo
This thesis examined Voice Onset Time (VOT) for voiced and voiceless stops across four English proficiency levels for sixteen Puerto Rican Spanish speakers at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. It used a Production Task to find out whether VOT values of voiceless and voiced stops in the Spanish and English of eight students varied across English proficiency levels and found that VOT values did not vary in Spanish but varied in English. High English proficiency students produced stops within the VOT range for American English; low proficiency students did not. The VOT production of the high proficiency students was consistent with an external target for English; that of the low proficiency students was consistent with inter-language and transfer. It used an Identification Task to examine whether eight students from the proficiency levels could identify the productions from the Production Task and found that identification did not match production.