INCOMPLETE NEUTRALIZATION IN EASTERN ANDALUSIAN SPANISH: PERCEPTUAL CONSEQUENCES OF DURATIONAL DIFFERENCES INVOLVED IN S-ASPIRATION

Jason Bishop
University of Leipzig

ID 1066
[full paper]

The present paper describes an experiment designed to assess the perceptual consequences of two attested phonetic differences, both durational in nature, said to represent incomplete neutralization in Eastern Andalusian Spanish cases of s-aspiration: aspiration duration and the phonetic length of a following consonant. For word-medial cases of s-aspiration, it is found that the length of a stop consonant following aspiration, but not the length of aspiration itself, can serve as a strong, disambiguating cue to listeners in making phonemic decisions as to an underlying coda. These results compliment evidence from production that s-aspiration represents incomplete neutralization in this variety of Spanish and, further, that incomplete neutralization is a phenomenon which can and should be studied beyond the cases of final devoicing to which most previous investigation has been limited.