The Aspiration of the Spanish Grapheme ‘h’

Authors

Carolina Gonzalo-Llera, Western Michigan UniversityFollow

Faculty Advisor

Holly Nibert

Department

Spanish

Presentation Date

4-15-2011

Document Type

Poster

Abstract

One aspect of Spanish pronunciation that differs from English pronunciation is the phonetic treatment of the letter ‘h’. While this grapheme corresponds to a voiceless glottal fricative [h] in English (also known as “aspirated [h]”), it has no phonetic realization in Spanish. In other words, the letter ‘h’ in Spanish is not pronounced at all or is “silent”. This difference often results in Spanish pronunciation errors by L2 learners of the language. The present study aims to deepen our understanding of the erroneous pronunciation of ‘h’ by exploring how prevalent the error really is in the speech of beginning and intermediate L2 learners and whether or not the phonetic shape of words has any effect on its occurrence.

Comments

One of the winners of the 2011 Research and Creative Activities Poster Day.

WMU ScholarWorks Citation

Gonzalo-Llera, Carolina, "The Aspiration of the Spanish Grapheme ‘h’" (2011). Research and Creative Activities Poster Day. 2.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/grad_research_posters/2