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Gradience and Variability of Intervocalic /s/ Voicing in Highland Ecuadorian Spanish

Garcia, Christina
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437154659

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.
This dissertation focuses on Highland Ecuadorian Spanish (HES), more specifically in the city of Loja, exploring how linguistic and social factors interact to condition a sound change in progress. While Lojano Spanish has many distinctive features, I examine intervocalic /s/ voicing, that is the variable pronunciation of /s/ as [s] or [z] (for example [masalto] ~ [mazalto] `taller’). This feature has been attested in a few modern dialects of Spanish, most prominently in HES (cf. Robinson 1979) and Catalonian Spanish (McKinnon 2012, Davidson 2014). The present work provides a comprehensive look at this feature in Lojano Spanish by investigating both production and perception. First, I analyze the production of this feature by carrying out a detailed acoustic analysis of 31 recordings with native Lojanos. The recordings include both sociolinguistic interviews, as well as a reading task. I measured over 2,969 tokens of /s/ for percent voicing and examined the influence of the following factors: word position, stress, speech rate, preceding/following vowel, and participants’ age and gender. Voicing is analyzed as both a continuous dependent variable (percent voicing) as well as a categorical variable (voicing category). Following Campos-Astorkiza (2014), voicing category is considered a tripartite distinction: voiceless (0-20%), partially voiced (20-90%) and fully voiced (100%). Overall, the production results show that /s/ voicing in Lojano Spanish is not categorical, but rather is a gradient, variable process. Increasingly voiced realizations are more likely in faster speech; in word final and initial contexts as opposed to medial; when /s/ is between unstressed syllables; before non-high vowels; and in the speech of younger participants and male participants. Second, I explore the perception of /s/ voicing in Lojano Spanish by conducting an online experiment. Twenty-four native speakers of HES participated in two tasks, the design of which was adapted from Boomershine et al. (2008). In the first, a similarity rating task, participants heard pairs of audio files and rated these pairs on a scale of 1 very similar to 6 very different. The second was a traditional discrimination task in which the participants heard these same pairs and decided if the two tokens were the same or different (Liberman et al. 1957). For the stimuli, I recorded a native speaker saying sequences of words that pertain to the three word positions (medial: asa, initial: la saca, final: las ata), producing voiced and voiceless variants of each. The pairs of audio files either had the same type of voicing, “identity” pairs ([asa] vs. [asa]) or different voicing ([aza] vs. [asa]), “difference” pairs. The results show that the listeners hear difference pairs as different more frequently than identity pairs; however, the robustness of this effect depends on word position, with the most robust effect in final position, followed by initial position, and the least robust effect in medial position. This demonstrates a connection between production and perception since it is precisely the environments in which Lojanos voice /s/ more (word-finally and initially) that they perceive most readily the difference between [s] and [z].
Terrell Morgan (Advisor)
Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza (Advisor)
Scott Schwenter (Committee Member)
Anna Babel (Committee Member)
216 p.
Linguistics; Sociolinguistics
Spanish Linguistics; sociolinguistics; phonetics; sociophonetics; Highland Ecuadorian Spanish; variation; allophonic perception; intervocalic s voicing

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Garcia, C. (2015). Gradience and Variability of Intervocalic /s/ Voicing in Highland Ecuadorian Spanish [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437154659

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Garcia, Christina. Gradience and Variability of Intervocalic /s/ Voicing in Highland Ecuadorian Spanish. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437154659.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Garcia, Christina. "Gradience and Variability of Intervocalic /s/ Voicing in Highland Ecuadorian Spanish." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437154659

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1437154659
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.