Cover not available
Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 20:3 (2023) ► pp.411–437

The role of perceptual salience in a strengthening sound change

A comparison of /j/ perception by Colombian and Dominican listeners

ORCID logo | Minnesota State University
| Princeton University

The current study examines the extent to which perceptual factors may account for the emergence of assibilated variants of the alveopalatal approximant /j/ in two geographically remote varieties of Spanish. Participants from Medellin, Colombia and Santiago, Dominican Republic completed a discrimination task and a matched guise. Both tasks presented listeners with stimuli containing affricate [ʤ] and approximant [j] allophones of /j/. Participants were more accurate when discriminating between sound pairs that included the affricate allophone, suggesting that the presence of (af)frication is a salient acoustic cue upon which judgments are reliably made. Therefore, we argue that the emergence of assibilated variants ([ʤ], [ʒ]) can be explained in part by more prominent acoustic cuing and thus greater perceptual salience. Evidence of the relationship between these findings and a possible sound change in progress is observed in the association of social characteristics with [ʤ] and [j].

Keywords: phonetics, yeísmo , sound change
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of literature
    • 2.1Phonetics of /j/ and synchronic variation
    • 2.2Variation and change in /j/
    • 2.3Perceptual salience
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Experiment design
      • 3.2.1Discrimination
      • 3.2.2Matched guise
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Discrimination
    • 4.2Matched guise
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.20047.den
References
Alonso, Amado
1925 “Crónica de los estudios de Filología Española (1914–1924).” Revue de linguistique romane.Google Scholar
1961 Estudios lingüísticos, Temas hispanoamericanos (2nd ed.). Madrid: Editorial Gredos.Google Scholar
Babel, Molly
2009 Phonetic and social selectivity in speech accommodation. University of Carolina, Berkely Doctoral Dissertation.
2010 “Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English.” Language in Society 39 (4): 436–456. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blevins, Juliette
2004 Evolutionary phonology, The emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan
2001 Phonology and language use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, and Shelece Easterday
2019 “Consonant strengthening, A crosslinguistic survey and articulatory proposal.” Linguistic Typology 23 (2): 263–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Campos-Astorkiza, Rebeka
2012 “The phonemes of Spanish.” In Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, ed. by José I. Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, and Erin O’Rourke, 89–110. Somerset, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Canfield, Delos L.
1962 La pronunciación del español en América, Ensayo histórico descriptivo. Bogotá, Instituto Caro y Cuervo.Google Scholar
Carrasco, Patricio, Hualde, José I., and Miquel Simonet
2012 “Dialectal differences in Spanish voiced obstruent allophony, Costa Rican versus Iberian Spanish.” Phonetica 691: 149–179. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia G., and David B. Pisoni
2002 “Perception of dialect variation, Some implications for current research and theory in speech perception.” Research on spoken language processing, Progress report no. 25, 270–289. Indiana: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Díaz-Campos, Manuel, and Terrell Morgan
2002 “On the production and perception of Spanish palatal obstruents, An acoustic phonetic study with implications for phonology, dialectology, and pedagogy.” In Structure, meaning and acquisition in Spanish, ed. by James F. Lee, Kimberly Geeslin, and Joseph Clancy Clements, 244–268. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Geeslin, Kimberly L & Laruen B Schmidt
2018 Study abroad and L2 learner attitudes. In The Routledge Handbook of Study Abroad Research and Practice, ed. by Cristina Sanz and Alfonso Morales-Front, 385–405. New York, NY: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grammont, Maurice
1933 Traite de Phonétique. Paris, Libraire Delgrave.Google Scholar
Hualde, José I.
2004 “Quasi phonemic contrasts in Spanish.” In Proceedings of the 23rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. by Vineeta Chand, Ann Kelleher, Angelo J. Rodríguez, and Benjamin Schmeiser, 374–398. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.Google Scholar
2014 Los sonidos del español. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Janson, Tore
1983 “Sound change in perception and production.” Language 591: 18–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, and Ann Williams
2002 “Salience as an explanatory factor in language change, evidence from dialect levelling in urban England.” In Language change, The interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors, ed. by Mari C. Jones, and Edith Esch, 81–110. Berlin/New York: Mouteon de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Midam, William S. Horton, and Ann R. Bradlow
2011 “The phonetic convergence in spontaneous conversations as a function of interlocutor language distance.” Lab Phonology 2 (1): 125–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1972 Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvanis Press.Google Scholar
2001 Principles of linguistic change, internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Leslie, Thomas
2016 “Language variation and change? An apparent-time analysis of /ʝ/ assibilation in Medellín, Colombia.” Paper presented at the 8th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, April 14, 2016. San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Lindblom, Björn
1990 “Explaining phonetic variation, A sketch of the HandH theory.” In Speech production and speech modelling, ed. by William J. Hardcastle and Alain Marchal, 403–439. Netherlands: Klower Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lope-Blanch, Juan M.
1966 “Sobre el rehilamiento de ll/y en México.” Anuario de letras 61: 43–60.Google Scholar
1970 “Las zonas dialectales de México, Proyecto de delimitación.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 191: 1–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacLeod, Bethany
2012 Effect of perceptual salience on phonetic accommodation in cross-dialectal conversation in Spanish. University of Toronto Doctoral Dissertation.
2015 “A critical evaluation of two approaches to defining perceptual salience.” Ampersand 21: 83–92. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio
1991 “Sobre la naturaleza fonética de los alófonos de /b, d, g/ en español y sus distintas denominaciones.” Verba 181: 235–253.Google Scholar
2015 “Naturaleza fonética de la consonante ‘ye’ en español.” Normas 51: 117–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moreno-Fernández, Francisco
2004 “Cambios vivos en el fónico del español, Variación dialectal y sociolingüística.” In Historia de la lengua española, ed. by Rafael Cano, 973–1004. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar
Navarro Tomás, Tomás
1934 “Rehilamiento.” Revista de Filología española 211: 274–279.Google Scholar
1956 “Apuntes sobre el español dominicano.” Revista Iberoamericana 211: 417–429. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ohala, John J.
1993 “Sound change as nature’s speech perception experiment.” Speech Communication 131: 155–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peña Arce, Jaime
2015 “Yeísmo en el español de América, Algunos apuntes sobre su extensión.” Revista de filología 331: 175–199.Google Scholar
Real Academia Española
2011 Nueva gramática de la lengua española, Fonética y fonología. Barcelona: Espasa Libros.Google Scholar
Rohena-Madrazo, Marcos
2015 “Diagnosing the completion of a sound change, Phonetic and phonological evidence for /ʃ/ in Buenos Aires Spanish.” Language Variation and Change 271: 287–317. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosenblat, Ángel
1967 “Contactos interlingüísticos en el mundo hispánico, el español y las lenguas indígenas de América.” In Actas del Segundo Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. by Norbert Polussen and Jaime Sánchez Romeralo, 109–154. Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.Google Scholar
Rost Bagudanch, María Asumpció
2011 Variación en los procesos de palatalización de yod segunda (o cómo la sincronía permite la explicación de la diacronía). Girona, Spain, Universitat de Girona PhD dissertation.
2014 “Una panorámica del yeísmo, ¿un proceso acabado o en construcción?.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 231: 141–164. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 “Variation and phonological change, The case of yeísmo in Spanish.” Folia Linguistica 511: 169–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shea, Christine, and Jeffrey Renaud
2014 “L2 perception of Spanish palatal variants across different tasks.” Bilingualism, Language and Cognition 171: 203–221. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siegel, Jeff
2010 Second dialect acqusition. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik
2011 Sociophonetics, An introduction. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter
1972 “Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich.” Language in Society 11: 179–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1986 Dialects in contact. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
2000 Sociolinguistics, An introduction to language and society (4th ed.). New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Zampaulo, André
2013 When synchrony meets diachrony, (Alveolo)palatal sound patterns in Spanish and other Romance languages. Ohio State University PhD Dissertation.
2019 Palatal Sound Change in the Romance Languages. Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar