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Title:
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Weakening of Intervocalic /p, t, k/ in Two Spanish Dialects: Toward the quantification of lenition processes
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Author:
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Anthony Lewis
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
, Deparment of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
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Degree Date:
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2001
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Historical Linguistics
Phonetics
Phonology
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Subject Language(s):
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Spanish
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Director(s):
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Daniel Silverman
Anna Escobar
Jennifer Cole
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Abstract:
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Traditional accounts of the voiceless stops in Spanish report a rather straightforward allophony in which /p, t, k/ are phonetically realized as [p, t, k] in all contexts. A number of recent studies, however, indicate a much wider range of allophonic var iation in which /p, t, k/ are produced with varying degrees of phonetic voicing and occasionally as voiced approximants, most often in the intervocalic context and in informal speech.
An experiment was conducted in which speakers from two dialects, Central Colombian and Northern Spain, produced speech in three styles: conversational, reading of text, and from a list of words. Productions of intervocalic /p, t, k/ were submitted to acoustic analysis considering four independent variables: speech style, place of articulation, lexical accent, and position in the word. Five acoustic correlates were measured: closure duration, voice onset time, closure voicing, intensity relative to the flanking vowels, and the conservation of release bursts.
The results suggest that speech style and lexical accent strongly influence the values obtained for some of the acoustic correlates, and that certain correlates are more reliable indicators of stop lenition than others. In addition, the Northern Spanish dialect was determined to be in a more advanced stage of lenition than the Central Colombian dialect. This result leads to the interpretation that different dialects of Spanish are found at different points along a stop lenition continuum rangin g from fortis to lenis.
The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the implications of the experiment's results on our present understanding of stop implementation in Spanish, and suggested avenues for future research. These include the proposal of a method by which the imperfect relationship between speech style and speech rate may be better understood, the consideration of the abruptness and degree of changes in relative intensity values in a vowel - stop consonant - vowel sequence a s a potential metric by which stop lenition may be quantified, and finally, the application of a similar experimental method to the voiced stops /b, d, g/ in order to gain insight into the nature by which phonological contrast is upheld in the Spanish sto p series.
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