Variations in Salvadorian /s/: An acoustic analysis of [s] and [&thetas;]

Heidi E Parker, Purdue University

Abstract

Even though more than twenty nations have Spanish as their official language, careful studies on its dialectology, phonology and phonetics have been limited to very few of these. This study presents an analysis of the Salvadorian /s/ with special attention to one of its allophones: [&thetas;]. In order to examine the usage of the fricative [&thetas;] among Salvadorian speakers, the spontaneous speech of 20 subjects from different areas of the country and different socio-economic backgrounds were analyzed. One important goal of this investigation was to support the existence of [&thetas;] as an allophone of /s/ with an acoustic and statistical analysis of the data in order to provide more reliable results. Both of these analyses demonstrated significant differences between the productions of [s] and [&thetas;]. The perceptual analysis suggested a production similar to [&thetas;] in the speech of 20% of the subjects. LPC (Linear predictive coding) analyses were used to evaluate the complex acoustic behavior of these fricatives and to compare the spectra produced in the articulation of these phones. The spectra yielded by the LPC analyses for [s] and [&thetas;] were noticeably different and the spectral envelope produced a similar pattern when comparing it to the same fricatives produced by Andalusian speakers. The ANOVA determined that the average peak values (in Hz) for [s] and [&thetas;] were significantly different (p<0.001). A larger corpus is needed, however, in order to determine if these findings are representative of this particular Salvadorian dialect. Even though other allophones of /s/ are more salient in this country (aspiration [h], weakened [s] and elision [Ø]), the allophone [&thetas;] represents an interesting case that may have consequences in the field of Spanish dialectology. The use of this allophone as a phonetic realization of /s/ is known by many as ceceo [&thetas;e.&thetas;é.o], although ceceo has been attributed mostly to the southern part of Spain. Most experts agree that the ceceo phenomenon does not exist in any part of Latin America, but there are a limited amount of reports of the existence of the allophone [&thetas;] in parts of Central America, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. Until now, such claims have not been verified (or rejected) by any published study. The phenomenon found in El Salvador can be compared to the Andalusian allophone [&thetas;] in that the production seems to follow a similar pattern and has similar acoustic behavior. However, the two phenomena vary greatly in the significant sociolinguistic factors underlying them and they are functionally two very different phenomena.

Degree

M.A.

Advisors

Hammond, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Linguistics|Modern language

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