Rachel Sangster Garza, Ph.D., a visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Sul Ross State University, has published a peer-reviewed research article in Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, an international scholarly journal dedicated to the study of Romance languages.
The article, titled “Duration as a Secondary Cue in Spanish Rhotics: Sliding to Understand Perceptual Categorization among Heritage and L2 Learners of Spanish,” examines how heritage language learners and second-language learners of Spanish perceive the distinction between Spanish tap and trill sounds.
Garza’s research analyzes how learners attend to segmental duration as a secondary acoustic cue when distinguishing between these sounds. Using an innovative methodology that incorporates visual analog sliders rather than traditional forced-choice tasks, the study provides new insight into how linguistic confidence and grammatical proficiency influence phonological perception. The findings show that both heritage and second-language learners attend to duration when perceiving the contrast, though heritage learners demonstrate clearer categorical distinctions. Linguistic confidence emerged as the strongest predictor of perceptual certainty across learner groups.
“This research helps us better understand how bilingual and second-language learners process subtle phonological contrasts in real-world language use,” Garza said. “It also highlights the importance of learner confidence and experience in shaping perception, which has meaningful implications for language instruction.”
The study was co-authored with Erik W. Willis of Indiana University and appears in a special issue of Isogloss focused on phonological perception. The journal is published by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and is widely recognized for its contributions to linguistics research.
The full article can be found online at https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v11-n4-garza-willis.
For more information, email rachel.sangstergarza@sulross.edu.
Photo: Dr. Rachel Sangster Garza