Acknowledgments: We wish to thank the speakers for participating in our study, SteveCowen for assistance with the recordings, and Alan Wrench for help with the ultrasound system. We thank the editor, Cynthia Clopper, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are our own. The research reported in this paper was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship PDF/pf130029 to the first author. AbstractThe fronting of the two high-back vowels /u:/ and /U/ in Southern British English is very well documented, but mainly in the acoustic domain. This paper presents articulatory (ultrasound) data, comparing the relative tongue position of these vowels in fronting and nonfronting consonantal contexts, i.e. preceding a coronal consonant (food, foot) and preceding a coda /l/ (fool, full ). Particular attention is paid to the comparison between articulatory results and corresponding acoustic measurements of F2 in both vowels. Results show that the average differences between food and foot and their dynamic profiles are similar in articulation and acoustics. In /u:l/ sequences (fool ), tongue position is more advanced than could be inferred from its low F2. In addition, even though the tongues position in fool and full is clearly distinct, there is no comparable corresponding difference in F2. This suggests that the common articulatory metaphor that characterises F2 increase as fronting must be used cautiously. In the case of English high-back vowel fronting, special attention must be paid to the flanking consonants when estimating vowel distances. This paper also provides specific recommendations for recording and analysing ultrasound data in research on vowel variation and change.

This paper presents new experimental data on Quito Spanish /s/-voicing, which has attracted considerable interest from theoretical phonologists owing to the overapplication of voicing to word-final pre-vocalic /s/. Bermúdez-Otero (2011) singles out Quito /s/-voicing as an important test case for discriminating between two competing theories of phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Output–output correspondence and cyclicity. Overapplication in /s/-voicing cannot be captured using correspondence relationship to a base form, which challenges Output–output correspondence as a theory of opacity. However, the argument only holds insofar as word-final pre-vocalic /s/-voicing is considered phonological, as Output–output correspondence can account for /s/-voicing assuming that it only applies in the phonetics (Colina 2009). We discuss the diverging empirical predictions concerning categoricity and gradience in the surface realisation of voicing processes. We further test these predictions based on acoustic data from seven speakers of Quito Spanish. Evidence from speech rate manipulations shows that some speakers produce more voicing during frication at normal speech rate, compared to fast, maintaining a stable voicing ratio across different speech rates. We argue that for these speakers, /s/-voicing is optional but categorical, and so it ought to be analysed as phonological. This result presents a challenge to the Output–output correspondence approach, but can be accommodated within cyclicity.

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Corresponding author: Patrycja StrycharczukWord-final consonants in Spanish are commonly assumed to undergo resyllabification across a word boundary before a following vowel, e.g., /los#otros/ 'the others' is realised as [lo.so.tros]. However, in many dialects of Spanish, word-final pre-vocalic consonants ('derived onsets') pattern phonologically with canonical codas and distinctly from canonical onsets. This property of derived onsets has been the subject of much interest in the phonological literature, and has led some linguists to question whether resyllabification indeed applies in all Spanish dialects. In this paper, we evaluate evidence for resyllabification based on acoustic data from 11 speakers of Peninsular Spanish. The results show that word-final pre-vocalic /s/ has increased duration compared to coda /s/, but at the same time, it is shorter compared to word-initial or word-medial pre-vocalic /s/. This result challenges an analysis where derived onsets become phonologically indistinguishable from canonical onsets. We consider an alternative in the form of partial resyllabification, and we further discuss the role of the syllable as a relevant unit in explaining /s/-sandhi in Spanish.