Chapter published in:
Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception
Edited by Whitney Chappell
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 21] 2019
► pp. 327–340

Chapter 12
Future directions for sociophonetic research in Spanish

| University of Michigan
This epilogue offers a brief overview of the eleven chapters included in this volume, calls attention to effective commonalities amongst the studies, and highlights innovative strategies for future sociophonetic research. The methodologies applied by the authors are discussed in relation to their work, which includes but is not limited to consonantal, vocalic, and regional variation in Spanish. Of these, special attention is paid to incorporating future work on vowel contrasts and prosody, with an in-depth discussion of potential implications. These topics are then re-integrated with the rest of the epilogue in order to offer insights into new avenues of theoretical interest, such as listener-based models of language change. A closer melding of data from production (articulation and acoustics) and from the perception of individual speakers presents a particularly fruitful direction for future research. Altogether, the works included in this volume lay the foundation for a promising future in the area of Spanish sociophonetic perception.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Variables of interest for future research
    • 2.1Vowels
    • 2.2Prosody
  • 3.Theoretical approaches for future research
    • 3.1The role of the listener as the initiator of sound change
    • 3.2The role of the production-perception relationship in sound change
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.21.13hen
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