What is it about?
Eastern Andalusian Spanish neutralises consonants in coda, although despite the neutralisation of most coda consonants, phonemic value has only been given to vowels preceding deleted /s/. The present paper expands on this traditional view and shows a more complex reality. This study will analyse differences between word-final /e/ and /e/ preceding deleted word-final /s/, /r/, and /θ/ in Western Almería (Eastern Andalusia) to determine if the deletion of each of these consonants causes consistent changes of quality to /e/, creating a system of four mid front vowels. A perception analysis will then determine if Western Almería speakers can distinguish between each of those vowels, which will confirm whether these realisations of /e/ have allophonic or phonemic value. An analysis shows consistent F1 and F2 values depending on whether /e/ is in coda or whether it precedes word-final /s/, /r/, or /θ/ deletion. Furthermore, perception tests show an ability to distinguish between some of those four mid front vowels.
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Why is it important?
This article shows that the deletion of EAS /-s/, /-r/, and /-θ/ changes the quality of a preceding /e/ in different ways.
Perspectives
Alfredo Herrero de Haro lectures Spanish at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His research interests are the acquisition of Spanish pronunciation by learners of Spanish as a foreign language, and phonetics and phonology, especially EAS phonetics and phonology.
Alfredo Herrero de Haro
University of Wollongong
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Four mid front vowels in Western Almería, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie (ZrP), January 2016, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/zrp-2016-0005.
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