Vowel distribution

The typical native Spanish-speaking ELL has difficulty distinguishing the so-called tense and lax vowel subsystems. In contrast, ChcE speakers resolve all such interlanguage mergers. They sustain the /i/ and /ɪ/ distinction. Still, some ChcE speakers pronounce the high vowel variably as from [ɪ] to [i], especially in the suffix, -ing (Fought 2003: 65).

Santa Ana’s (1991) spectrographic study found the typical tense/lax front vowel distribution, in terms of F1/F2 parameters, among four native English-speaking Chicanos. Their front tense vowels had a dense narrow distribution in vowel space, while the corresponding distribution of their front lax /ɪ, ε/ vowels created a more diffuse, less peripheral cloud in vowel space.

The ChcE /æ/ patterns with low vowels, rather than front vowels, as is the case for other U.S. English dialects. Thus, /æ/ has greater F1 range than F2 (front/back). The distribution of this vowel creates a narrow cloud that is elongated along the height parameter. For this reason, ChcE appears to be participating in the General California English æ-raising process (Fought 2003, but cf. Veatch 1991). In addition, the ChcE articulation of the AmE low back vowel, /ɥ/ , as in mom or caught, is often a Spanish [a], as in talk, daughter and law (Fought 2003).

A spectrographic study of four native speakers indicates that the nucleus of the high back vowel, /u/, is either fronted or fronting (Santa Ana 1991). The distribution cloud of /u/ extends across the upper top of the vowel space, from the back to an intermediate front of the /i/ cloud. There is little overlap with the front vowel distribution clouds; the /u/ distribution is higher than the mid-front vowel cloud.

While Santa Ana (1991) finds much less /ʊ/ fronting than u-fronting in the speech of the Los Angeles Chicano men he instrumentally plotted, Fought (2003) states that ChcE /ʊ/ is realized at times as a high rounded  , while at other times it is an unrounded fronted /ɨ/, as in look or looking.