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Part of
Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception
Edited by Whitney Chappell
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 21] 2019
► pp. 187–210

Chapter 6
The role of social networks in cross-dialectal variation in the perception of the Rioplatense assibilated pre-palatal [ʃ]

| San Diego State University

This chapter presents a quantitative study of cross-dialectal differences in the perceptual categorization of the assibilated pre-palatal (e.g., calle ‘street’ /kaʃe/), a feature of Rioplatense Argentine Spanish. Listeners from two South American varieties of Spanish that varied in degree of contact with Rioplatense speakers completed an Identification Task in which they categorized [ʃ] in Spanish pseudowords. Results revealed that listeners from the contact group (La Rioja, Argentina) identified the phone as the intended phonetic category, orthographic <y ll>, while listeners with limited contact with Rioplatense Spanish (Bogota, Colombia) assigned the phone to a separate category, orthographic <ch>. The study shows how contact with non-local speech varieties may result in changes to perceptual norms, even in the absence of use (production) of these forms.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • Regional variation in speech perception, Spanish
    • Social networks and speech perception
    • Variation in articulation of Spanish orthographic <y> and <ll>
    • Research questions
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Tasks
      • Identification task
      • Language Background and Dialect Contact Questionnaire
      • Data analysis
  • Results
    • Categorization of Rioplatense pre-palatal by yeísta listeners
    • Regional variation in categorization of [ʃ]
    • Individual variation and dialect contact experiences
    • Metalinguistic commentary
  • Discussion
    • Categorization of the sociophonetic variants by the 'yeísta' listeners
    • Regional perceptual variation according to degree of dialect contact
    • Social networks and speech perception
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.21.07sch
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