An Initial Examination of Southwest Spanish Vowels (original) (raw)

2005

Abstract

ABSTRACT. This article investigates the Spanish vowel system of Southwest Spanish speakers through an acoustic examination of F1 and F2. The corpus is based on a semi-spontaneous narrative by four female speakers. Repeated measurements of all five Spanish vowels in a stressed syllable are plotted, as well as a comparison of 30 productions of /a/ in a stressed and unstressed syllable. The findings indicate several shifts in the generally accepted Spanish vowel triangle including a lowering and fronting of /u/, a lowering of /o/, and a fronting of /a/ to the vowel space typically described for English /ae/. There was no reduction of unstressed /a/ tokens to a schwa. * ********** INTRODUCTION. while English dialectal variation of segments has typically focused on differences in vowel production, dialectal and sociolinguistic studies of Spanish segmental variation have tended to concentrate on consonants (Zamora and Guitart 1982, Lipski 1994). This focus on vowels reflects Navarro Tomas...

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