An Acoustic and Perceptual Analysis of Compensatory Processes in Vowels Preceding Deleted Post-Nuclear /s/ in Andalusian Spanish

Abstract

According to the Distinctiveness Conditions proposed by Kiparsky (1982), semantically relevant information tends to be retained in the surface structure. As a result, one would anticipate either the retention of /s/ or some compensatory mechanism to convey the information lost by its deletion in those dialects of Spanish that systematically weaken to the point of deletion said segment in syllable- and word-final positions. Following the methodologies of Hammond (1978) and Figueroa (2000), the objective of this study is to experimentally explore in Andalusian Spanish the possible existence of a phonological quantitative and/or qualitative compensatory mechanism, realized as either vowel lengthening or an open-closed vowel alternation, in an attempt to disambiguate those tokens rendered homophonous by the deletion of final /s/. Speech samples were elicited from six native speakers of Andalusian Spanish. These speech samples were then organized into a four-part perception test and administered to twenty-five participants who were also native speakers of this same dialect area. Finally, spectrographic analysis was performed on all tokens used in the perception test. This study found no systematic evidence of any compensatory mechanism at work in the vowels preceding /s/ → [ø] in word-final position. However, this investigation did find sufficient evidence for the phonemicization of vowel duration in syllable-final position within the word. An average increase of 24.4% in the length of the vowel preceding the [ø] allophone of /s/ provided the participants with adequate acoustic cues to correctly distinguish pairs such as buque [ˈβu.ke] ‘ship’ (n.) and busque [ˈβuø.ke] ‘look for’ (3SG.PRES.SUBJ) at a rate of 79.0%. The aforementioned findings concur with those of both Hammond (1978) for Miami-Cuban Spanish and Figueroa (2000) for Puerto Rican Spanish.