Revisiting the Sociolinguistic Analysis of Variable Coda /s/ Weakening in Spanish: An Instrumental Phonetic Approach

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Studying the variable pronunciation of syllable-final /s/ in Spanish (mismo 'same,' sabes 'you know,' buenas 'good') has been central to the field of sociolinguistic variation. On the basis of naked ear perceptions, previous studies describe Spanish /s/ as either a fully articulated [-s], an under-articulated [h], or as a case of total /s/ deletion. But this segmental description obscures systematic patterns of acoustic variation; variable speech phenomena are more accurately described by computer-based, instrumental measures of subsegmental speech sounds. On the basis of interviews with both monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilinguals that includes both Latin American-born and U.S.-born speakers, this study will provide instrumental phonetic descriptions of 20,000 tokens of syllable-final Spanish /s/, calculating, for each token, a subsegmental description in terms of duration in milliseconds and frequency in hertz. The study will include detailed specifications of language-internal and socio-demographic predictor variables of these tokens. The societal impact of the study of variability stems from the evidence it provides for the systematicity of linguistic behavior in all speakers, irrespective of income, education, citizenship, or bilinguality. Participants in the present study range over all these social categories. Consequently, a more exact understanding of their speech sheds light broadly on the most widely spoken minority language in American society and the most frequently taught foreign language in American schools. The study thus contributes to building a truer, more accurate conception of the sociolinguistic landscape in American immigrant and minority communities, in American schools, and in U.S. society as a whole.