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Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 17:3 (2020) ► pp.438–463

Seeds of change

Social factors conditioning intervocalic /s/ voicing in Loja, Ecuador

| Saint Louis University

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.

Keywords: Ecuadorian Spanish, intervocalic /s/ voicing, sociophonetics
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
Published online: 15 January 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.19012.gar
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