Lilianna Flores
Research Mentor(s): Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya
Mentor Department: Romance Languages and Literatures
Authors: Lilianna Flores, Nicholas Henriksen
Session: Session 4 (1:00pm – 1:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 74
Abstract
There are many dialects of Spanish, each with their own unique characteristics. This project focuses on Andalusian Spanish, a lesser known dialect which is spoken in the south of Spain. Andalusian Spanish has a feature of deleting the /s/ phoneme in word-final position. While the /s/ phoneme is prominent in most Spanish dialects, and grammatically differentiates the singular form from the plural form in nouns, this feature is missing among most Andalusian speakers. Words are still written to suggest an /s/ phoneme, but they are not articulated in everyday speech. Therefore corte and cortes to the untrained ear, both sound like corte, the singular form. Still, an Andalusian Spanish speaker can tell the difference between the two forms through other phonetic properties. Previous research has shown that laxing happens with the /o/ and/ e/ phonemes, signifying to the speaker the plurality status of the word. However no study has shown the effects of stress and other vowels on this phenomenon. To account for this gap in the research, we made a list of words with varying stress and additional vowels to retest this phenomenon. We then took recordings of 38 Andalusian Spanish speakers reciting the phrases we wrote for them. The sample ranged from 19-62 in age, all from a city near Granada, Spain. Using this data one assistant labeled each of the vowels differentiating vowels in a program called Praat, by whether it was singular or plural, and how many syllables there were in the word. After that, we had another assistant label the /a/, /i/, and /u/ phonemes in Praat to get the point vowels to normalize the data. Using the normalization we will be able to plot the data, and compare the vowels in the plural and singular forms. Lesser known dialects are often underrepresented in the media or portrayed with negative stereotypes. Because they differ from the standard dialect, they are sometimes seen as “improper†or “lazyâ€. However, this research gives Andalusian Spanish speakers a more accurate representation and recognizes their dialect as a legitimate form of communication.
