Spanish Phonetics

En los últimos años se ha avanzado considerablemente en el estudio de los distintos sonidos del español, tanto desde un punto de vista articulatorio como acústico. Ello debe atribuirse, sin duda, a las novedades que el progreso tecnológico ha permitido poner al servicio de la fonética experimental. Además, se está produciendo un sano debate sobre la relación existente entre la fonética y la fonología, terreno en el que algunos investigadores han indicado que la primera debería ser el campo de pruebas, el punto de partida para llegar a la generalización abstracta propia de la segunda. Ello implica que la ciencia fonológica no queda encerrada en sí misma sino que, para llegar a sus explicaciones, puede acudirse a otras disciplinas contiguas como la dialectología, la sociolingüística o la historia de la lengua, sin ir más lejos, lo que supone una abertura importante de los horizontes en la explicación fonética.

El siguiente capítulo pretende presentar un panorama general de la investigación en la adquisición de la pronunciación del español en Japón mediante una revisión bibliográfica de los estudios contrastivos y metodológicos sobre enseñanza y problemas en el aprendizaje de la pronunciación de español LE por hablantes de japonés.

Descripción detallada de la ortografía y del sistema fonético y fonológico del español  para estudiantes universitarios italianos, en italiano.  Apuntes del curso de Lingua e traduzione spagnola, Dip. di Studi Umanistici, Università di Torino. Versión revisada y corregida, marzo 2021.

This work supposes a new look at the “yeísmo” phenomenon, which usually has been treated from a regional perspective. In this case, a revision on the whole Spanish domain is been done based on the analysis of linguistic atlas data. Such a method allows us to focus on results from real speakers (real tokens) though it has the problem that there are important areas left with no linguistic atlas published. Nevertheless, it is possible to examine most of the Peninsular (and Insular) Spanish and most parts of American Spanish. The results prove that the phenomenon is not homogeneous in none of the regions considered; in fact, it exhibits a high degree of variation. Our findings make evident that there is an unfinished change process which can conclude in hipoarticulated sounds (relaxed solutions) in some regions or in hiperarticulated (strengthened solutions) in others.

Despite previous studies on Eastern Andalusian Spanish, interest in this geolect boomed only after the theory of vowel doubling was posited for this variety of Spanish. According to this theory, in Eastern Andalusian Spanish, vowels preceding /s/ aspiration or deletion change their quality and, as a result, carry the semantic function of /s/. Since then, many researchers have studied the vowel and consonant systems of this variety of Spanish and the phonetic-phonological debate is still ongoing. This article reviews the main studies on Eastern Andalusian Spanish pronunciation between 1881 and 2016, comparing the different findings in that period and summarising them chronologically. The article finishes with an outline of widely accepted and debated features of Eastern Andalusian Spanish in order to identify future lines of research.

In Russian the trill (whether hard or soft) is produced with one closure more than in 90 % of cases. Speech pathologist consider one closure trill as a defective realization. Obviously, something is lacking in the definition of the defective trill. To shed some light on the problem it could be useful to compare characteristics of Russian trill with rhotic sounds in Spanish where multiclosure trill is phonologically opposed to tap.

Este trabajo 1 constituye la culminación de los trabajos presentados en sobre la entonación interrogativa y en Cantero et al. (2005) sobre la entonación enfática. En él se presentan los resultados de nuestra investigación sobre la entonación del español en habla espontánea, realizada en nuestro centro a lo largo de los últimos seis años 2 .

Se analizan los novedosos esquemas entonativos que genera la publicidad en contraste con los prototipos estándares del modus oracional, a partir de entonación y enunciado, entonación paralingüística, verum focus y significado procedimental. También se analizan las novedades de la estructura silábica en el lenguaje digital y en el lenguaje de los deficientes mentales

In this paper, we performed the experimental acoustic
analysis of the harmonicity, sonority, duration and
intensity features of every /b, d, g/ sound in a
spontaneous speech sample on spectrograms offered
by PRAAT, with the general objective of describing
these features behaviour within each one of the
appearance contexts, and the possible relations among
them. The corpus -obtained through recordings of local
TV programs of Andalusia, Madrid and the Basque
Country-, consists of a total of 1292 /b, d, g/ sounds
analysed, that were prompted in authentic
communicative situations.

In this paper we describe an experimental analysis of vowel duration in Spanish. Some factors that seem relevant in other studies for characterizing vowel duration were analized here using speech data from two speakers. These factors are: vowel identity, phrase boundaries, lexical stress, open versus closed syllables and effect of the postvocalic consonant. Our results show that Spanish vowels have intrinsic duration and there are some contextual factors, like phrase final boundary, stressed syllables and open syllables, that influence vowel lengthening. For voicing and manner of articulation of postvocalic consonant, significant differences were not found.

The purpose of this essay is the analysis of the Spanish lateral consonant [l] when preceding a palatal semiconsonant [j] for it has been observed in spontaneous speech that, in such context, [l] seems to suffer a palatalization process due to the influence of the following sound. Besides, works on Dialectology or recent investigation on Diachrony give reasons to considerate that this process is possible in Spanish. However, the essays describing the Spanish phonetic and phonological system do not mention this phenomenon. In order to find out if there is only an alveolar realization for [l] before [j] or if it is possible to find variation in that context, we have studied its behaviour from an acoustic point of view, focusing on the F1, F2 and F3 frequencies and the duration of the consonant and its transitions to the following sound. The results prove the existence of different allophones for [l] and they allow us to defend that, in such a context, palatalization not only is possible but usual in Spanish.

El proyecto VILE tiene como objeto el estudio fonético acústico de la variación inter e intralocutor en español para aplicar sus resultados al reconocimiento automático de hablantes y a la práctica de la fonética forense. En este trabajo se presentan los resultados de una primera etapa, consistente en una revisión de las publicaciones que abordan los parámetros acústicos relevantes para la identificación del hablante y en un estudio de los corpus orales existentes en español a partir de los cuales se puede constituir el conjunto de datos que serán analizados en las siguientes fases del proyecto.

Although language contact is one of the driving forces of language change at any level, little is known about how intonational change may be induced by language contact. This article describes the intonational consequences of the contact between Galician and Spanish. In order to achieve this goal, a corpus comprising 546 Wh-questions collected by means of the Discourse Completion Task is analysed. The data obtained from bilingual speakers show that the intonation patterns of Wh-questions in Galician Spanish are the same as in Galician, while they differ from the intonation patterns of Wh-questions in the other documented varieties of Peninsular Spanish (Central Peninsular Spanish, Manchego, Andalusian, Cantabrian, Asturian and Leonese Spanish). This suggests that there exists a direct intonational transfer phenomenon from Galician to the variety of Spanish spoken by bilingual speakers in Galicia.

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.

A aquisição do sistema vocálico do português por falantes nativos da variedade rio-platense de espanhol: uma discussão sobre a bidirecionalidade da transferência vocálica RESUMO: Este estudo visa a investigar a produção vocálica de hispano-falantes (variedade Rioplatense) em português (L2), bem como verificar alterações no espaço vocálico materno destes falantes em termos de influências exercidas pela segunda língua (L2). Os dados foram coletados de 10 participantes argentinos -5 monolíngues e 5 bilíngues. Verificaram-se os valores de F1, F2 e de duração, em espanhol (L1) e em português (L2), de falantes bilíngues. Verificou-se, também, a produção em espanhol por parte do grupo de monolíngues, residentes na Argentina, tomados como controle. Os resultados mostraram, em termos de altura e anterioridade/posterioridade, que os participantes não realizam as distinções entre as vogais médias-baixas e médias-altas na L2. Entretanto, verificou-se que suas vogais médias-altas ocupam um espaço mais alto no espaço acústico, como se o sistema estivesse se adaptando para a formação das médias-baixas. Tal tendência foi verificada tanto nas produções da L2 como na L1, mas não nas produções dos monolíngues argentinos. Quanto à duração, os bilíngues apresentaram vogais mais longas na L2 e produziram, na L1, vogais mais longas do que aquelas dos monolíngues. Tais evidências, analisadas sob uma concepção de língua enquanto Sistema Adaptativo Complexo (DE BOT et al., 2013), indicam uma multidirecionalidade na transferência linguística.

Yeísmo has been accounted for as a merger process occurring in Spanish irrespective of language contact effects though some scholars have claimed that the interference between Spanish and the variety of Catalan spoken in Majorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) has an inhibiting effect on yeísmo. This paper focusses on whether this inhibiting effect can be demonstrated at the perception level and whether it has an effect in the linguistic behaviour of bilinguals. To examine these effects, we conducted an identification experiment with three groups of listeners (Majorcan Catalan-dominant bilinguals, Spanish-dominant bilinguals and a control group of Spanish monolinguals). Results show that Catalan dominants do recognise [ʎ] stimuli, but Spanish dominants only identify [ʎ] at chance level. Consequently, it would seem that bilingual subjects display a bimodal performance at the perception level.

The purpose of this work is to describe the appearance and location of typographically unmarked pauses in any Spanish text to be read. An experiment is designed to derive pause location from natural speech: results show that Intonation Group length constraints guide the appearance of pauses, which are placed depending on syntactic information. Then, a rule-based algorithm is developed to automatically place pauses whose performance is tested by means of qualitative tests. The evaluation shows that the system adequately places pauses in read texts, since it predicts 81% of orthographically unmarked pauses; when pauses associated to punctuation signs are included, the percentage of correct prediction increases to 92%.

As in other languages, stress in Spanish is signaled by three simultaneous acoustic cues: fundamental frequency (F0), duration and intensity. In this experiment, the role of these parameters in the perception of lexical stress in isolated words has been studied using natural resynthesized speech. Results show that the F0 contour alone is not enough to allow the identification of the stressed syllable of a word. However, in combination with duration, intensity or both duration and intensity, F0 is a relevant acoustic cue for the perception of lexical stress. On the other hand, intensity and duration, either combined or in isolation, are not sufficient for the identification of the stressed syllable within a word. It is generally acknowledged that, as in other languages, stress in Spanish is signaled by three simultaneous acoustic cues: fundamental frequency (F0), duration and intensity. An earlier perceptual study using synthetic stimuli [1] concluded that, in Spanish, F0 is the only...

Phonetic analysis of the speaking styles can involve the study of the differences in the manifestation of phonetic processes. The aim of this work is to observe and classify low-level reduction processes affecting consonants by means of an acoustic and auditive analysis of a sample of spontaneous speech in Spanish. A continuum of articulatory reduction arises out of the data. Moreover, the acoustic behaviour of the processes helps to establish differences between speaking styles.

This work is devoted to a variation phenomenon in Spanish: /n, l, d, s/ flapping, which has been traditionally accounted for from a dialectological perspective. In fact, the literature describes an [l]-[ɾ] alternation in some meridional Spanish dialects (Zamora Vicente 1967, Quilis 1999: 355-359, Alvar 1996a, 1996b), but it is not common to find references relating to /n, d, s/ flapping (Núñez Cedeño 1987, Granados 1999), excluding some historical studies based on written documents (Lapesa 1981). However, previous work on /n/ and /l/ variation (Rost Bagudanch 2009, 2014) showed that flapping was a possible allophone for these phonological categories (see also Rost Bagudanch 2016).
At this point, some interesting questions arise, the most important being whether [ɾ] can be a widespread realization for coronal segments, that is, a peripheral exemplar which can be at the intersection point of the cloud of variants corresponding to /l/, /n/, /d/ and /s/ (in the sense of Pierrehumbert 2001, 2002; Bybee 2002: 69). It would seem that such a segment would emerge as a consequence of a lenition process consisting on duration reduction, probably due to hypoarticulation situations in informal speech (see Bauer 2008: 612-613, Lindblom 1990). Another relevant issue is whether the flap displays acoustic variation depending on the phonological category it is associated to.
The main goal of this research is, then, to examine the production of /l/, /n/, /d/ and /s/ phonemes in Spanish from an acoustic point of view in order to investigate if the flap is a possible allophone for them. If this is the case, a second aim is to describe its acoustic characteristics to classify the potential variation.
We thus carried out a pilot experiment involving spontaneous speech, a situation in which lenition processes are more likely to be present. We recordered 5 Madrilenian speakers, aged between 30 and 35, all of them with university studies. The recordings were carried out in the Phonetics Lab in CSIC (Madrid), with an AKG C444 microphone connected to a PC equipped with Adobe Auditon software. We extracted the lexical words containing /l/, /n/, /d/ and /s/ and we analysed its production with Praat, taking into account their acoustic proprieties (including duration). We considered three factors: stress, word position and the adjacent context.
The hypothesis is that flap cases are part of the cloud of exemplars of the above-mentioned phonological categories and that this type of segment can be defined as a transversal element when occurring weakening processes. First results seem to confirm this idea.