ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the relatively young history of research on the phonological system of heritage Spanish that has been conducted within a range of US-based contexts (i.e., specifically on Spanish-English bilinguals). It begins at the segmental level, where it first focuses on vowels, mainly in terms of reduction processes, but also through the lenses of perception versus production and vowel sequences. The section on consonants discusses a series of linguistic and extralinguistic factors influencing voiced and voiceless stops, laterals and rhotics, and fricatives. Upon turning to suprasegmental issues, which are less studied, the chapter incorporates work on statement and question intonation, speech rhythm, and stress. After summarizing what we have discovered to date about the phonology of US heritage Spanish, the chapter concludes by aiming to inform and inspire ways of advancing the field through a series of points for researchers to consider critically, such as data elicitation procedures, methods of drawing interspeaker comparisons, and, last, and perhaps most important to the current volume, ideas for bridging the gap between acoustic analysis and phonological theory.
