Madrid Spain
Pronouns: her/she
Research Mentor(s): Nicholas Henriksen, Associate Professor
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Romance Languages and Literatures, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021
Session: Session 4 (2pm-2:50pm)
Breakout Room: Room 1
Presenter: 1
Abstract
Despite the breadth of existing research in Spanish Linguistics, there remains a deficiency in phonetics literature focused specifically on Buenos Aires Spanish. My current project attempts to remedy this by investigating the nature of intervocalic /p/ production by native speakers of this dialect. The Buenos Aires region has a large and diverse population whose phonetic variation in relation to other varieties of Spanish is underexplored. One example concerns the production of intervocalic voiceless phonemic stops (i.e., /p t k/), which are known to be variably produced with voicing in intervocalic position in Peninsular dialects, such as North-Central Peninsular and Andalusian Spanish (Hualde et al., 2011; O’Neill, 2010). If this phenomenon is the result of phonetic and phonological properties characteristic of Spanish generally, it stands to reason that this tendency could be developing in other geographically distant varieties. Considering other phonetic similarities between the Spanish of the Cono Sur and Spain (i.e., aspiration of syllable-final /s/), our team selected Buenos Aires as a starting point to pursue this possibility. My role in this project has been to annotate the read speech of 40 Buenos Aires speakers for the duration of each intervocalic /p/ produced in word-initially or word-medially and each following vowel.
Authors: Madrid Spain, Nicholas Henriksen
Research Method: Language Skills
