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Part of
Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015
Edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15] 2018
► pp. 95–120

Chapter 5
The simultaneous lenition of Spanish /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ as a chain shift in progress

| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This study examines dialect differences in the simultaneous lenition of intervocalic /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ in Peruvian Spanish in Lima and Cuzco. Results from a read speech task show both sets of plosives are lenited significantly less in Cuzco than in Lima. Random forests demonstrate that differences in voicing best explain the distinction between /ptk/ and /bdɡ/, that differences in relative intensity best explain the distinction in Lima, and that in order to best distinguish Cuzco /bdɡ/ from Lima /ptk/, relative intensity must be given more importance than voicing. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that these lenitions constitute a chain shift in progress and offer insight into how these shifts may occur.

Keywords: phonetics, plosive lenition, chain shift, dialect differences, Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Push chain shifts
    • 1.2Lima Spanish
    • 1.3Cuzco Spanish
    • 1.4Motivation for the current study
  • 2.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Tasks and recording
    • 3.4Acoustic measures
      • 3.4.1Constriction
      • 3.4.2Duration and voicing
    • 3.5Data segmentation
    • 3.6Data extraction
    • 3.7Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1/ptk/
      • 4.1.1/ptk/ voiceless period duration
      • 4.1.2/ptk/ intensity difference
    • 4.2/bdɡ/
      • 4.2.1/bdɡ/ voiceless period duration
      • 4.2.2/bdɡ/ intensity difference
    • 4.3Dialect differences in variable importance and classification accuracy
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Evaluation of hypotheses
    • 5.2Simultaneous lenition of /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ in Spanish as a push chain shift
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 14 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.06eag
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