Rhotic variation and contrast in veracruz Mexican Spanish
Phonetic studies of Spanish rhotics report a wide range of allophonic variants of the syllable-initial trill /r/, which raises the question of whether the intervocalic contrast between /r/ and the tap /ɾ/ has been neutralized in many dialects. This study presents a spectrographic analysis of s...
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | Catalan |
| Published: |
Universitat de Barcelona
2012-05-01
|
| Series: | Estudios de Fonética Experimental |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/experimentalphonetics/article/view/44188 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: |
Phonetic studies of Spanish rhotics report a wide range of allophonic variants of the syllable-initial trill /r/, which raises the question of whether the intervocalic contrast between /r/ and the tap /ɾ/ has been neutralized in many dialects. This study presents a spectrographic analysis of syllable-initial rhotics as produced by ten speakers of Veracruz Mexican Spanish in a guided, semi-spontaneous speech task. Trills that show a reduction in the degree of lingual trilling usually contain an approximant phase following one or two lingual contacts, which we represent as [ɾɹ] or [rɹ] in narrow transcription. Intervocalic taps show both reduction and elision, but those with a measurable contact are short enough to maintain an acoustic difference with the longer allophones of /r/. Taken with recent studies of rhotics in Dominican Spanish, these findings suggest that the contrast between /r/ and /ɾ/ can be maintained in terms of overall segmental duration even when there is no difference in the number of lingual contacts.
|
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1575-5533 2385-3573 |