ABSTRACT
Very little work has directly examined the phonetic and phonological systems of heritage speakers, and more specifically, heritage speakers of Spanish (HSS) as they have been linguistically and culturally defined. This chapter reviews investigations that examine the phonological production and perceptual patterns of HSS who were either born in the U. S. or moved here prior to the age of 6 and have experienced and continue to experience contact between Spanish and English. Studies on the heritage Spanish phonetic and phonological system are limited in number, perhaps due to impressionistic observations that HSS often "sound" like native speakers of Spanish. Much of the initial work on the heritage Spanish consonantal system has focused on the voiceless and voiced stop consonants /ptk/ and /bdg/, respectively, as these groups of sounds have key phonetic and phonological differences in English and Spanish. Prosody is perhaps the least explored area of the phonetic and phonological systems of HSS.
