Influenced by the minority language of the region, speakers of Asturian Spanish vary in their production of word-final back vowels in the masculine singular morpheme, with realizations that range from Spanish [o] (/pero/) to Asturian [u] (/peru/). Previous research has found that listeners’ social judgements of speakers are affected by whether [-o] or [-u] are used. This study explores how social cues about the speakers affect the listeners’ perception of these vowels. The results of a binary forced-choice identification task combined with sociolinguistic priming show that productions paired with visuals of urban status were more likely to be identified as Spanish /-o/, but only when listeners were in favor of Asturian attaining co-official status. The results contribute to our understanding of the role that explicit stigmatization and overt language attitudes have on phonetic representation.
Building off a series of matched guise studies focused on attitudes toward native-like (L1) and accented (L2) Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia, Spain (Woolard, 1984, 1989, 2009, 2011; Woolard & Gahng, 1990), this study explores covert and overt attitudes toward two specific phonetic features of Catalonian Spanish, namely lateral velarization and intervocalic /s/ voicing. Catalan-Spanish Barcelonan bilinguals and Madrid Spanish monolinguals (N = 54) completed a matched guise task eliciting covert judgments toward each phenomenon independently. Results from the matched guise, in combination with elicited overt attitudes from sociolinguistic interviews, demonstrate how broader linguistic attitudes and ideologies toward the Spanish language can be comprised from an aggregate set of individual speech variants and the distinct social values afforded to each of them.
This article analyzes the social perceptions of ceceo and distinción in the town of Lepe, Spain using a matched-guise experiment created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve speakers, varying only in realizations of syllable initial coronal fricatives. Based on an analysis of 92 listeners’ evaluations, the speaker guises with distinción are rated as higher status, more educated, more urban, and more formal and are assigned more occupational prestige than those with ceceo. Additionally, listeners with more years lived away from Lepe perceived these differences more so than those with little to no years lived away from Lepe. The implications are three-fold: (i) listeners in Lepe evaluate the national standard feature of distinción as more prestigious than the traditional dialect feature of ceceo; (ii) it can be suggested that time away from Lepe impacts listeners’ social evaluations of ceceo and distinción; and, (iii) even smaller non-urban communities are susceptible to changing language attitudes. Such differences in the perceived social value of these phonetic norms likely contribute to the ongoing dialect convergence of ceceo to distinción in Lepe.
Of considerable interest to linguists recently is the variable voicing of intervocalic /s/, which has been attested in dialects as diverse as Ecuadorian (Chappell, 2011; García, 2015; among others) and Catalonian Spanish (Davidson, 2014; McKinnon, 2012), among others. While our knowledge of the production of this variable has advanced, the question remains of how /s/ voicing is evaluated socially (although see Chappell, 2016). This chapter details a matched-guise experiment comparing the evaluation of intervocalic [s] and [z] in one coastal and three highland Ecuadorian cities. The results show that this variable is a regional marker within the highlands, and that it is also associated with status, pleasantness, and age, but only for female speakers. In contrast to other studies on social meaning, it is only females’ use of intervocalic [z] that is socially-charged, whereas males’ use is not strongly associated with any of the social characteristics examined.
The Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, spoken in the village of San Basilio de Palenque, has been in contact with its historical lexifier, Spanish, for several centuries. The lexicons of the two languages are more than 90% cognate, including complete identity (based on the local vernacular variety of Spanish) and predictable phonological modifications resulting from the historical development of Palenquero in contact with Kikongo and other Central African languages, in addition to some less predictable correspondences. Previous research has demonstrated that Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals are influenced by key grammatical items in on-line (real-time) identification of the language of an utterance (all-Spanish, all-Palenquero, or mixed). The present study examines the role of regular Palenquero-Spanish phonotactic correspondences in facilitating language identification by Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals. Three experiments provide data: a single-word language identification task, an on-line rapid language identification task, and an on-line processing task in which participants signal points of transition between Palenquero and Spanish. The results point to a subtle but real role for Palenquero-Spanish phonological predictability in language identification, with enhanced importance for young L2 Palenquero speakers. More generally, the observations are relevant to other revitalization efforts that involve a minority language substantially cognate with the dominant language. The data from L2 Palenquero speakers suggest that sociophonetic awareness can aid in bootstrapping emergent grammatical competence in the minority language.
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.
In this study, we investigate what social meaning is attributed to a nascent change in progress in Chilean Spanish, examining whether intervocalic voicing of the phonologically voiceless stop /k/ affects listener judgments along several perceptual scales. Eight brief excerpts of spontaneous speech were digitally manipulated to vary only in voicing in tokens of /k/, and thirty listeners responded via an online experiment. We find that listeners are not sensitive to voicing along three of the measured scales and are not sensitive to voicing at all in female speech. We also determined that listeners are only sensitive to intervocalic voicing when assigning values of Chilean identity to male speakers, and that this effect is mitigated by headphone use. Some of listeners’ insensitivity matches previous production data in this dialect, while we expected some sensitivity along other measures but found none. We posit that this mismatch is due to the salience of the variable: because listeners may be unfamiliar with intervocalic voicing of /k/, they have not yet indexed voicing of intervocalic /k/ with particular speaker features, aligning with Campbell-Kibler (2009).
This study uses a prominent phonetic variable in U.S. Spanish (orthographic <v> as bilabial or labiodental) to investigate heritage Spanish speakers’ social perceptions. Based on the results of a matched-guise test in which 75 U.S.-born heritage speakers evaluated voices with a labiodental and bilabial guise, heritage speakers perceive [v] positively in the voices of women as a marker of status, confident Hispanic identities, and older age, but negatively in the voices of men. The results show that heritage speakers use phonetic variants to discern social information about others, and their judgments largely align with monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers. I conclude that heritage speakers’ sociophonetic perception in their home language attests to a rich inner world often overlooked by prescriptive forces.
This study investigates the auditory lexical processing of the two main variants of “ch” (as in charco ‘puddle’) used in the Spanish spoken in northwestern Mexico. A feature of this dialect is the variable implementation of “ch” either as an affricate, [tʃ], or a fricative, [ʃ]. We designed an auditory lexical decision task with auditory priming to explore the effects (if any) of this variability on the recognition of words by members of this community. Target words were presented with either variant as their word-initial consonant (e.g., [tʃ]arco ~ [ʃ]arco), and they were preceded by auditory primes with a matching variant ([tʃ]arco-[tʃ]arco, [ʃ]arco-[ʃ]arco), a mismatching variant ([tʃ]arco-[ʃ]arco, [ʃ]arco-[tʃ]arco), or an unrelated prime. The results show that members of this community are equally likely to accept Spanish word forms produced with either variant. Furthermore, both variants primed listeners equally effectively in their recognition of spoken words, suggesting that both activate the same entry in their mental lexicon (as opposed to parallel representations). Finally, recognition was found to be faster when the word-initial phonetic variant was [tʃ]; this suggests a privilege of [tʃ] over [ʃ] at some level of representation. The results support the claim that, in cases of sociophonetic variability, members of the speech community may include more than one phonetic variant in their mental representation of words, but that, even in such cases, one of the variants may take processing precedence over the other. These results, in turn, suggest it is possible that the nature of the mental representations of an individual are particularly affected by the dialect spoken in their speech community.
This study investigates the perception and production of two sociophonetic variables of Chihuahua Spanish: rhotic assibilation ([ř]), a change from above associated with women and higher classes, and deaffrication of the voiceless post-alveolar affricate ([ʃ]), a change from below associated with men and lower social classes. Thirty-three native Spanish speakers from Chihuahua completed a production task to establish whether they produced [ř] or [ʃ] and a discrimination task to determine if they were able to perceive these variants. Results show that while production rates were similar for [ř] and [ʃ], listeners had greater sociolinguistic awareness of [ʃ], resulting in a closer production-perception relationship for this variant. We conclude that the perception and production of phonetic variants interact in variable-specific ways that depend crucially on a combination of linguistic and social factors, including phonological context, frequency, and social salience to the speech community.
Sociolinguistics is grounded in the premise that social variables are essential to understanding how language works. While early Spanish sociolinguistic studies focused on speech production, there is a growing body of work in Spanish sociophonetics that recognizes the role of speech perception in variation and social identity. As this field grows, it is useful to reflect upon best practices for moving forward. To that end, this chapter considers the field from a theoretical lens, focusing on intersectional approaches (Crenshaw, 1989; Levon, 2015) as it addresses the practical challenge of replicability (Simons, 2014) and offers recommendations for a holistic approach that will poise Spanish sociophonetic perception data to effectively address questions of language variation and change.
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.
Influenced by the minority language of the region, speakers of Asturian Spanish vary in their production of word-final back vowels in the masculine singular morpheme, with realizations that range from Spanish [o] (/pero/) to Asturian [u] (/peru/). Previous research has found that listeners’ social judgements of speakers are affected by whether [-o] or [-u] are used. This study explores how social cues about the speakers affect the listeners’ perception of these vowels. The results of a binary forced-choice identification task combined with sociolinguistic priming show that productions paired with visuals of urban status were more likely to be identified as Spanish /-o/, but only when listeners were in favor of Asturian attaining co-official status. The results contribute to our understanding of the role that explicit stigmatization and overt language attitudes have on phonetic representation.
Building off a series of matched guise studies focused on attitudes toward native-like (L1) and accented (L2) Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia, Spain (Woolard, 1984, 1989, 2009, 2011; Woolard & Gahng, 1990), this study explores covert and overt attitudes toward two specific phonetic features of Catalonian Spanish, namely lateral velarization and intervocalic /s/ voicing. Catalan-Spanish Barcelonan bilinguals and Madrid Spanish monolinguals (N = 54) completed a matched guise task eliciting covert judgments toward each phenomenon independently. Results from the matched guise, in combination with elicited overt attitudes from sociolinguistic interviews, demonstrate how broader linguistic attitudes and ideologies toward the Spanish language can be comprised from an aggregate set of individual speech variants and the distinct social values afforded to each of them.
This article analyzes the social perceptions of ceceo and distinción in the town of Lepe, Spain using a matched-guise experiment created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve speakers, varying only in realizations of syllable initial coronal fricatives. Based on an analysis of 92 listeners’ evaluations, the speaker guises with distinción are rated as higher status, more educated, more urban, and more formal and are assigned more occupational prestige than those with ceceo. Additionally, listeners with more years lived away from Lepe perceived these differences more so than those with little to no years lived away from Lepe. The implications are three-fold: (i) listeners in Lepe evaluate the national standard feature of distinción as more prestigious than the traditional dialect feature of ceceo; (ii) it can be suggested that time away from Lepe impacts listeners’ social evaluations of ceceo and distinción; and, (iii) even smaller non-urban communities are susceptible to changing language attitudes. Such differences in the perceived social value of these phonetic norms likely contribute to the ongoing dialect convergence of ceceo to distinción in Lepe.
Of considerable interest to linguists recently is the variable voicing of intervocalic /s/, which has been attested in dialects as diverse as Ecuadorian (Chappell, 2011; García, 2015; among others) and Catalonian Spanish (Davidson, 2014; McKinnon, 2012), among others. While our knowledge of the production of this variable has advanced, the question remains of how /s/ voicing is evaluated socially (although see Chappell, 2016). This chapter details a matched-guise experiment comparing the evaluation of intervocalic [s] and [z] in one coastal and three highland Ecuadorian cities. The results show that this variable is a regional marker within the highlands, and that it is also associated with status, pleasantness, and age, but only for female speakers. In contrast to other studies on social meaning, it is only females’ use of intervocalic [z] that is socially-charged, whereas males’ use is not strongly associated with any of the social characteristics examined.
The Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, spoken in the village of San Basilio de Palenque, has been in contact with its historical lexifier, Spanish, for several centuries. The lexicons of the two languages are more than 90% cognate, including complete identity (based on the local vernacular variety of Spanish) and predictable phonological modifications resulting from the historical development of Palenquero in contact with Kikongo and other Central African languages, in addition to some less predictable correspondences. Previous research has demonstrated that Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals are influenced by key grammatical items in on-line (real-time) identification of the language of an utterance (all-Spanish, all-Palenquero, or mixed). The present study examines the role of regular Palenquero-Spanish phonotactic correspondences in facilitating language identification by Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals. Three experiments provide data: a single-word language identification task, an on-line rapid language identification task, and an on-line processing task in which participants signal points of transition between Palenquero and Spanish. The results point to a subtle but real role for Palenquero-Spanish phonological predictability in language identification, with enhanced importance for young L2 Palenquero speakers. More generally, the observations are relevant to other revitalization efforts that involve a minority language substantially cognate with the dominant language. The data from L2 Palenquero speakers suggest that sociophonetic awareness can aid in bootstrapping emergent grammatical competence in the minority language.
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.
In this study, we investigate what social meaning is attributed to a nascent change in progress in Chilean Spanish, examining whether intervocalic voicing of the phonologically voiceless stop /k/ affects listener judgments along several perceptual scales. Eight brief excerpts of spontaneous speech were digitally manipulated to vary only in voicing in tokens of /k/, and thirty listeners responded via an online experiment. We find that listeners are not sensitive to voicing along three of the measured scales and are not sensitive to voicing at all in female speech. We also determined that listeners are only sensitive to intervocalic voicing when assigning values of Chilean identity to male speakers, and that this effect is mitigated by headphone use. Some of listeners’ insensitivity matches previous production data in this dialect, while we expected some sensitivity along other measures but found none. We posit that this mismatch is due to the salience of the variable: because listeners may be unfamiliar with intervocalic voicing of /k/, they have not yet indexed voicing of intervocalic /k/ with particular speaker features, aligning with Campbell-Kibler (2009).
This study uses a prominent phonetic variable in U.S. Spanish (orthographic <v> as bilabial or labiodental) to investigate heritage Spanish speakers’ social perceptions. Based on the results of a matched-guise test in which 75 U.S.-born heritage speakers evaluated voices with a labiodental and bilabial guise, heritage speakers perceive [v] positively in the voices of women as a marker of status, confident Hispanic identities, and older age, but negatively in the voices of men. The results show that heritage speakers use phonetic variants to discern social information about others, and their judgments largely align with monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers. I conclude that heritage speakers’ sociophonetic perception in their home language attests to a rich inner world often overlooked by prescriptive forces.
This study investigates the auditory lexical processing of the two main variants of “ch” (as in charco ‘puddle’) used in the Spanish spoken in northwestern Mexico. A feature of this dialect is the variable implementation of “ch” either as an affricate, [tʃ], or a fricative, [ʃ]. We designed an auditory lexical decision task with auditory priming to explore the effects (if any) of this variability on the recognition of words by members of this community. Target words were presented with either variant as their word-initial consonant (e.g., [tʃ]arco ~ [ʃ]arco), and they were preceded by auditory primes with a matching variant ([tʃ]arco-[tʃ]arco, [ʃ]arco-[ʃ]arco), a mismatching variant ([tʃ]arco-[ʃ]arco, [ʃ]arco-[tʃ]arco), or an unrelated prime. The results show that members of this community are equally likely to accept Spanish word forms produced with either variant. Furthermore, both variants primed listeners equally effectively in their recognition of spoken words, suggesting that both activate the same entry in their mental lexicon (as opposed to parallel representations). Finally, recognition was found to be faster when the word-initial phonetic variant was [tʃ]; this suggests a privilege of [tʃ] over [ʃ] at some level of representation. The results support the claim that, in cases of sociophonetic variability, members of the speech community may include more than one phonetic variant in their mental representation of words, but that, even in such cases, one of the variants may take processing precedence over the other. These results, in turn, suggest it is possible that the nature of the mental representations of an individual are particularly affected by the dialect spoken in their speech community.
This study investigates the perception and production of two sociophonetic variables of Chihuahua Spanish: rhotic assibilation ([ř]), a change from above associated with women and higher classes, and deaffrication of the voiceless post-alveolar affricate ([ʃ]), a change from below associated with men and lower social classes. Thirty-three native Spanish speakers from Chihuahua completed a production task to establish whether they produced [ř] or [ʃ] and a discrimination task to determine if they were able to perceive these variants. Results show that while production rates were similar for [ř] and [ʃ], listeners had greater sociolinguistic awareness of [ʃ], resulting in a closer production-perception relationship for this variant. We conclude that the perception and production of phonetic variants interact in variable-specific ways that depend crucially on a combination of linguistic and social factors, including phonological context, frequency, and social salience to the speech community.
Sociolinguistics is grounded in the premise that social variables are essential to understanding how language works. While early Spanish sociolinguistic studies focused on speech production, there is a growing body of work in Spanish sociophonetics that recognizes the role of speech perception in variation and social identity. As this field grows, it is useful to reflect upon best practices for moving forward. To that end, this chapter considers the field from a theoretical lens, focusing on intersectional approaches (Crenshaw, 1989; Levon, 2015) as it addresses the practical challenge of replicability (Simons, 2014) and offers recommendations for a holistic approach that will poise Spanish sociophonetic perception data to effectively address questions of language variation and change.
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.