Seeds of change
Social factors conditioning intervocalic /s/ voicing in Loja, Ecuador
Intervocalic /s/ voicing is of much interest recently in Hispanic Linguistics for two principal reasons: this
feature has been attested in diverse dialects of Spanish, and it has been shown to correlate in production and perception with
social factors (Davidson 2014; Chappell
2016; García 2019; among others). One finding that often surfaces is that male
speakers voice more than female speakers, and recent studies consider whether this may be due to physiological differences (File-Muriel, Brown, and Gradoville 2015; Chappell and
García 2017). The present study examines the interaction of gender, age, and interspeaker variation in the voicing of
intervocalic /s/ in the speech of 31 natives of Loja, Ecuador. While variationist studies overwhelmingly show women leading change
in progress, I argue that young men are leading voicing in Lojano Spanish and that this study of a smaller, non-English speaking
community further elucidates the intricacies of gender and linguistic change.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Ecuadorian Spanish
- 2.2Spanish /s/ voicing
- 2.3Gender and linguistic change
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Data collection
- 3.2Acoustic analysis
- 3.3Statistical analysis
- 4.Results
- 4.1Overall results
- 4.2Results of continuous analysis
- 4.3Results of categorical analysis
- 4.4Interspeaker variation
- 5.Discussion
- 5.1Intersection of age and gender
- 5.2Voicing and gender
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by 1 other publications
Núñez-Méndez, Eva
2022.
Variation in Spanish /s/: Overview and New Perspectives.
Languages 7:2
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