On the social perception of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish

What is it about?

To decipher for the first time what, if any, social meaning is indexed by nonstandard intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rica, such as [paza] for pasa ‘raisin’, the present study digitally manipulates 12 utterances from six Costa Rican speakers to vary only in intervocalic [s] versus [z]. Based on 106 listeners’ responses to these stimuli, I find that intervocalic [z] indexes a lower social status for all speakers but also yields higher ratings of confidence, niceness, localness, and masculinity for male speakers. Given female speakers’ limited ability to evoke positive social meanings associated with [z], I argue that accessibility to the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) conditions men’s and women’s differential treatment of variation.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This works helps offer a more satisfying explanation for the gender paradox (Labov, 2001:261–293), which points out that women tend to be both more innovative and more conservative speakers. I argue that women agentively eschew nonstandard variants that result in no positive social gains but lead linguistic innovation when their access to the indexical field is unobstructed.