Sociophonetic analysis of mid front vowel production in Barcelona

Studies aimed at observing Spanish contact-induced changes in Catalan among Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Catalonia have evidenced both assimilation and dissimilation in the production of Catalan mid front vowels. However, the general lack of studies aimed at observing Catalan contact-induced changes in Spanish is an oversight of bidirectionality as an expectation of language contact. Accordingly, the present study uses both Catalan and Spanish mid front vowel production data from Barcelona to investigate the roles of age, gender, and language dominance in the processes of assimilation (Catalan cognate effects in Spanish) and dissimilation (distinctly produced cross-linguistic mid front vowel categories). While no cognate effect was observed in Spanish, younger speakers maintain less distinction between Catalan mid front vowel categories than older speakers, and females have less overlap between Spanish /e/ and Catalan /\textepsilon/ than males. These results are consistent with a male-led change towards greater assimilation and more overlapping productions of all three mid front vowel categories. While cognitive factors such as language dominance and cognate status are central to models of bilingual phonetic representation, it is paramount to situate the bilingual individual within the context of the community and acknowledge the external social factors which also mediate variation in acquisition and production.