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Reduced vowels between obstruents and rhotics are durationally variable and phonologically invisible in Spanish, e.g. pərado 'field' as /pɾ/. The present study compares L1-Spanish speakers, English monolinguals, and L2-Spanish learners' perceptual boundaries for reduced vowels in Spanish. A native speaker produced 70 Spanish nonce words with word-initial obstruent + vowel + flap sequences, and the duration of each vowel was manipulated from 100% to 75%, 50%, and 25% of its original duration. To determine whether these groups perceive variably reduced vowels as phonologically visible, 78 listeners counted the number of syllables perceived in 280 target audio files. Linear regression models fitted to 21,436 responses indicate that English monolinguals apply an L1 perceptual strategy, but L2-Spanish learners have shifted their perceptual boundaries. The study concludes that the perception of highly variable acoustic information becomes more native-like with greater L2 proficiency, while age of acquisition is less predictive of native-like perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nicaraguan Spanish is characterized by the reduction of coda /s/ to glottal frication, elision, and glottal constriction, but the latter variant has never been explored in depth. The present study fills this void by analyzing the word-final, intervocalic /s/ environment in sociolinguistic interviews, reading tasks, and image identification tasks conducted with 36 Nicaraguans with the goal of detailing the social patterning of glottal constriction. I find that glottal constriction patterns like sibilance, a hyperarticulated variant, and a statistical analysis reveals two distinct hyperarticulation strategies in formal tasks based on age and education. Given their differing responses toformality, I propose that more educated and younger speakers with more exposure to prescriptive norms apply sibilance, a global hyperarticulation strategy, to signal their education and power on an international scale, while less educated and older speakers utilize glottal constriction to construct an identity associated with regional articulateness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]