Front vowels of Spanish: A challenge for Chinese speakers

Abstract This research proposes to define the timbre of front vowels [e] and [i] in the spontaneous speech of the Spanish interlanguage spoken by Chinese people and to determine the convergent and divergent features of Peninsular Spanish. Variables such as gender, level of Spanish proficiency and the (a)tonicity of the vowels will also be assessed to see the extent to which these factors influence the pronunciation of the learners. A corpus of 1,489 front vowels produced by 36 Chinese speakers and a corpus of 420 vowels produced by 79 Spanish speakers were used for this study. The mean F1 and F2 values were calculated for each vowel. According to the statistical analysis of spontaneous speech, the interlanguage and the target language are similar in that the sounds [i] and [e] are significantly different, the atonic and tonic [i] show no significant differences and the tonic [e] is more open than the atonic [e] in both genders. However, the interlanguage diverges more from the target language because the timbre of the front vowels is more dispersed, that of [i] is more closed and fronted and that of [e] is more open and fronted, in both males and females, tonic and atonic. Finally, the study reveals that the level of language proficiency and tonicity are factors that influence the acquisition of pronunciation.