In this study, we identify the linguistic and social predictors that condition onset /s/ weakening in speech data from sociolinguistic interviews with 72 Salvadoran Spanish speakers. In addition, we compare and contrast the explanatory power of instrumental and traditional segmental approaches. We find that the instrumental approach, which identifies flanking segments, stress, and region of origin of the speaker as conditioners of onset /s/ shortening and lowering of center of gravity, does not account for observed social variation in the data. Contrastingly, an ordinal logistic regression based on a combination of instrumental measures and perceived phonetic categories identifies flanking segment, region of origin, sex, and age of the speaker as predictors of onset /s/ weakening. We conclude that an exclusively instrumental analysis examining variation of onset /s/ thus obscures the potential social meaning of onset /s/ weakening in El Salvador.
This paper examines seven acoustic properties of /s/ in Chilean Spanish (CS) and Salvadoran Spanish (ES). Acoustic measurements from 36 speakers, balanced for gender and dialect, reveal several cross-dialectal differences: CS /s/ was significantly longer than ES /s/ in coda position and had a higher spectral center of gravity. Two findings were mitigated by gender: women in both dialects were more likely to voice /s/, but the magnitude of the difference in voicing between male and female speakers was greater in CS. There were no differences in relative intensity in CS, while in ES, /s/ used by males has significantly lower relative intensity than /s/ used by females. No dialect differences were found for variance, kurtosis, or skewness. While both CS and ES are frequently collocated under the umbrella of “/s/ weakening dialects,” our results show that tokens of non-deleted /s/ are acoustically distinct. These findings suggest that shorter duration and lower spectral energy in ES could be the result of a looser or backer constriction of /s/ and may have implications for work examining cross-dialectal differences in /s/ lenition at the phonetics/phonology interface.
This paper examines final /z/ devoicing among Chicanx teens in Southern California to investigate the degree to which devoiced final /z/ neutralizes with final /s/ in this dialect. Results indicate on the one hand that devoiced /z/ remains distinct from /s/: as expected, devoiced /z/ is significantly less voiceless than /s/ and has a significantly lower center of gravity (COG). However, unexpectedly, devoiced /z/ has a significantly longer fricative duration and a significantly shorter preceding vowel duration than /s/, a pair of results that run counter to general tendencies for voiced fricatives to be shorter and have longer preceding vowels than their voiceless counterparts. We propose that these durational findings may explain, at least in part, the salience of final /z/ devoicing in Latinx Englishes despite its ubiquity among speakers of mainstream US English. In this first instrumental sociophonetic account of final /z/ devoicing in Latinx Englishes, we also find that, counter to existing segmental accounts, the morphological status of /z/ is no longer a significant predictor of devoicing. Moreover, while both following segment and speaker gender are significant predictors of devoicing, they do not condition devoicing in the expected ways.
The present study aims to build on limited Chicano English intonation research by exploring the frequency, phonetic properties, timing, and potential origins of uptalk in neutral declarative statements of Chicano Southern California English (CSCE). Fifteen native CSCE speakers and five native Anglo Southern California English (ASCE) speakers from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area (all college-age women) participated in three tasks varying in their formality. Five measures were examined across dialects and within the CSCE speaker group: uptalk frequency, starting pitch, scaling, rise alignment, and peak delay. Results show that CSCE and ASCE speakers produce extremely similar uptalk contours both in how often they occur and in their phonetic manifestations, suggesting that ASCE uptalk, rather than the Mexican Spanish circumflex contour, is the main source of intonational transfer for final rising in CSCE. Furthermore, while Barry (2007) proposes that ASCE uptalk is unmarked, we find that uptalk frequency is conditioned by task formality for both dialect groups, indicating that this variable may have since risen above the level of consciousness. The amount of Spanish spoken in childhood and the academic environment of the colleges attended by our CSCE participants also affect how often uptalk is produced and its beginning pitch level.
Previous research on /s/ weakening in Spanish has consistently aligned with Labovian principles: women prefer the prestige variant, usually [s], while men favor nonstandard, lenited variants. However, in Salvadoran Spanish—a dialect that weakens /s/ across syllable positions and shows allophonic variation beyond the tripartite paradigm of [s]/[h]/[∅]—gender-based lenition patterns contradict this generalization. This study examines the production of phonological /s/ by 72 Salvadorans balanced for region, urbanicity, age, and gender who participated in sociolinguistic interviews in El Salvador in 2015. We find that women not only lenite /s/ at higher rates than men overall, but also produce significantly more of the variants that carry the most local stigma. We further find that, counterintuitively, women are significantly more likely than men to lenite /s/ in utterance- and word-initial prosodic positions, which are stronger and more perceptually salient than medial and final tokens. We argue that these discrepancies are best understood by taking El Salvador’s unique historical and sociopolitical context into account. Specifically, we propose that a culture of state-sanctioned violence against women and the unprecedented threat of gangs in El Salvador have led to the social segregation and linguistic isolation of women, affording them little access to standard linguistic forms even as globalization, urbanization, industrialization, and migration facilitate a shift toward linguistic standardization.
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