The Acoustic Realization of the Stop Voicing Contrast in Argentine Spanish

Abstract

Consonant lenition is a synchronic and diachronic sound change in which consonants become "weaker" or more vowel-like in certain contexts, especially between vowels. Given the variability in how Spanish dialects lenite the voiced stops and given that some varieties of Spanish have been shown to weaken the voiceless stops too, this raises the question of how different dialects of Spanish realize the stop voicing contrast. This thesis explores this issue for Argentine Spanish. This study is based on the corpus data with 9 speakers, 400 recordings containing the 6 stops in intervocalic position. The Acoustic