Sociophonetic perception towards English loanwords in Puerto Rican Spanish

Abstract

This study examines English loanwords (ELs) in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) from the perspective of sociophonetics and indexical meanings. It investigates the metalinguistic, ethno-sociological, and psycholinguistic meanings that are associated with the ELs' adapted pronunciation [ɻ] and the accommodated pronunciations [l, ɾ, r]. Through an online audio-image questionnaire, 50 Puerto Rican participants listened to and evaluated 25 lexical stimuli in English (ELs), which were obtained from two interview corpora, in which /ɾ/ and /r/ were proportionally distributed in coda and onset positions, respectively. From the correlational statistical analysis and linear regression, we concluded that the participants recognize metalinguistically the sociophonetic variation and the sociolinguistic distribution of /ɾ/ and /r/ in the English loanwords (ELs). In addition, they provided ethno-sociological and psycholinguistic judgments concerning the Els' allophonic variants /ɾ/ and /r/ in an intuitive way and, many times, guided by their emotions, feelings, experiences and previous learnings, all inside an ambiguous and dynamic sociolinguistic context, which is particular to this speech community. This study proves that the indexicalized knowledge that is part of the participants' semantic memory spreads to particular sociophonetic facts, including ELs.