Spanish-Russian Phonetic Transfer: Pronunciation and Perception of Fricative Consonants

The study is dedicated to perception and pronunciation of Russian fricatives by speakers of different variants of the Spanish language. The aim is to identify the environment of fricatives in which there could be voicing or devoicing of Russian fricatives, articulation errors, phoneme substitution, and difficulties with phonemes perception. The fricative inventory of standard Spanish is represented by two fricatives: alveolar /s/ and labiodental /f/ however, in different variants of Spanish, the inventory is expanded with fricative allophones [ɸ], [h], [v], [ʃ], [ʒ], [ʑ], [ç]. Phonation and lenition as a result of the use of fricative allophones in Spanish variants are not significant to the meaning of the word, respectively, Spanish speakers make mistakes in pronunciation of Russian fricatives which are in the same phenetic environment as in their L1. There were two experiments carried out in the study – on perception and pronunciation of Russian fricatives by Spanish speakers. The results showed that the great part of listeners failed in distinguishing phonemes /с, з, ж, ш, в, ф/ in terms of voicelessness and sonority as part of syllables, words and phrases. Speakers of Andean, Rioplatense, and Central American Spanish had difficulty distinguishing between sibilants /ж/ and /ш/. Speakers of northern variant of European Spanish performed well on distinguishing /c/ and /з/ in intervocalic position due to Catalan transfer, as /s/ and /z/ in intervocalic position are significant to the meaning of the word. Speakers of all varieties of Spanish from Latin America had difficulties in identifying /в/ and /ф/. The experiment on the pronunciation of fricative sounds showed that speakers of different varieties of Spanish in Latin America voiced /с/ before sonorants /м, н, л/; speakers of different variants of Spanish in Latin America devoiced /з/ in position between vowels, against, speakers of the northern dialect of European Spanish didn’t make that mistake. Also, in this part of the experiment, it was possible to note a number of other deviations in pronunciation that had not been predicted, for example, /ж/ occurred as /j/ in the intervocalic position. In the final part of the work, methodological developments for correcting the pronunciation of Russian fricatives by Spanish speakers were presented.