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Miquel Simonet, Marcos Rohena-Madrazo, and Mercedes Paz
72-86 (complete pdf)
Puerto Rican Spanish is usually described as one of the Caribbean Spanish dialects that neutralizes the liquids /r/ and /l/ in coda position (e.g. /árma/ is pronounced as [álma] 'weapon', and /álma/ is pronounced as [álma] 'soul'). However, Paz (2005) found that, although /r/ and /l/ had similar (continuant) realizations, they were kept distinct in the speech of one Puerto Rican individual. Additionally, in a perception experiment, Paz showed that Puerto Rican listeners identified words with continuant coda /r/ and /l/ with much greater accuracy than a group of Argentinean listeners, whose performance was not different from chance. However, Paz's production data were based on the speech of a single speaker who was not naïve as to the purpose of the experiment. In the present paper the authors extend Paz's findings by analyzing the acoustic characteristics of vowel+liquid sequences in the speech of four Puerto Ricans, two females and two males. The duration and the formant structure of these sequences were investigated. The results show that, although /r/ resembles /l/ in many respects, they are not identical (i.e., they are "incompletely neutralized"). Rhotic and lateral productions differed both in their duration (with /l/ being longer than /r/) and in the values of the first and third formants (with F1 being higher and F3 being lower in /r/); the results were robust for all four speakers. The present findings challenge the alleged frequency of coda /r/ and /l/ neutralization in Puerto Rican Spanish as the authors show that the liquids seem to be "incompletely neutralized".
Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology
edited by Laura Colantoni and Jeffrey Steele
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-424-9 library binding
v+181 pages
publication date: 2008
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA