El estado final de la adquisición de las vibrantes españolas por inmigrantes a España con inglés como primera lengua

This study investigates the ultimate attainment of the second language acquisition of Spanish rhotics by a group of U.S.-born, native English speaking immigrants to central Spain who are long-time residents. While previous studies examine the second language acquisition of Spanish rhotics, these tend to focus on university students learning Spanish, and thus nothing is known about the extent to which advanced second language learners develop in their rhotic pronunciation and how closely they approximate the pronunciation of native speakers. The extensive immersion in the Spanish language and culture that characterizes these immigrants gives them as high a likelihood as one could expect of second language learners of achieving native-like pronunciation. As a group, however, acoustic analysis reveals that the immigrants do not approximate nativespeaker performance, though they far exceed that of learners in other studies. While one immigrant does come close to native-like performance, most fall short.