Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

New Voices for Ancestral Sounds: The Acquisition of Nawat Phonology by Speakers of Salvadoran Spanish

by Hugo Salgado

Nawat, the highly endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, is undergoing a revitalizationprocess. This dissertation, conceived within this context, focuses on the second-language (L2)acquisition of features of Nawat pronunciation by learners who have Salvadoran Spanish as theirfirst language (L1). Specifically, I assess the acquisition of one Nawat segmental feature and oneprosodic feature through their production by L2 learners: 1) the Nawat velar stop phoneme /ɡ/,which has different allophones according to its surrounding sounds, and 2) Nawat utterance-finalvowel glottalization, that is, the production of utterance-final vowels with increased constrictionof the vocal folds to signal the end of an utterance. The goals of this dissertation are: 1) toexplore whether L2 Nawat learners become more proficient in the production of these Nawatfeatures as their years of Nawat study increase, 2) to identify the linguistic contexts in which theproductions of these Nawat features by L2 learners differ the most from L1 Nawat speakers, and3) to assess whether the progress in the L2 acquisition of these Nawat features is equally linearor if one aspect is more difficult to learn than the other.For this purpose, a total of 21 L2 Nawat learners were recorded performing a reading taskin Nawat and Spanish designed to elicit the sounds of interest in different contexts. A controlgroup consisting of five L1 Nawat speakers were also recorded performing open-endedinterviews and a picture description task to serve as a baseline. I find that, overall, L2 Nawatlearners become more proficient in the production of Nawat /ɡ/ as their years of study increase.However, there are contexts in which productions of Nawat /ɡ/ by L2 learners and L1 speakersconsistently diverge, namely, when word-initial /ɡ/ is in the post-lateral position and when word-iimedial /ɡ/ is in the post-approximant, post-lateral, and post-obstruent contexts. I argue that thesedifferences are the result of L1 transfer and hypercorrection.As for the L2 acquisition of Nawat utterance-final vowel glottalization, progress isobserved but, unlike Nawat /ɡ/, even the most advanced learners do not produce Nawatutterance-final vowels at rates comparable to L1 speakers. In fact, most Nawat utterance-finalvowels produced by L2 learners show weakened voicing rather than glottalization, which Iinterpret as L1 transfer. Thus, an asymmetry in the acquisition of these features of Nawatpronunciation is identified, which I attribute to the inherent complexity of prosody, the perceivedsimilarity between the L1 and L2 sound systems, frequency, and the Nawat input received by L2learners. This dissertation highlights the need to inform the Nawat teaching curricula to focus onthe production and perception of utterance-final vowel glottalization and develop more effectivepedagogical materials and practices to teach them.