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This paper aims to present the multiple realizations of lower limit and of speakers from different Spanish speaking territories found in the extensive oral corpus FEC (Fonología del Español Contemporáneo). We present several acoustic criteria to assign the continuum between occlusive and approximant to different phonetic variants to enable quantitative analysis of the corpus. The results of the acoustic analysis confirm the different phases described in previous literature of the phenomenon in the different Spanish speaking territories. Additionally, they show that a) palatal fricative realizations [?] - the IPA symbol commonly used for the phoneme - is very rare in the corpus and b) that in territories that distinguish between/?/and/j/, hybrid variants consisting of lateral + central that show a beginning delateralization are quite recurrent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper studies issues related to the history of Spanish attested in a translation of David’s psalms by a Jamaican rabbi, completed in the late 17th century and with a London publication in collaboration with a group of influential and highly cultured Sephardim. The versification of the corpus makes it possible to establish with complete certainty the cultural value of the fee form, and of graphically similar elements (vee, see), in relation to the fashion of writing and the weight of the forensic tradition. The rhyme in proparoxytone verses also gives diachronic firmness to several hypercorrect proparoxytones found in Daniel Israel’s work, of problems concerning both European and American Spanish, and the analysis also points to the need for revision of the etymologies of the entries vaguido, with its inclusion of váguido, and vahído in the Academy’s dictionary, in conjunction with documentation and phonetic evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In PRECAVES XXI context, this paper we report the results of a research on the perceptions of young Chilean university students, both to different Spanish and to their own variety. The aim of this study is to analyze the linguistic attitudes of 100 of these subjects, in terms of which varieties they consider to be better and more prestigious and what perceptions they have of their own variety of Spanish, attending to direct evaluations (cognitive and affective) and indirect. A survey was conducted combining direct and indirect methods of data collection using the matches guise technique. The main findings of this study indicate that, for most of the subjects in the sample, there is not one variety of Spanish better than another, and among those who prefer one, the Andean and Chilean varieties have more prestige. Likewise, there are direct and indirect attitudes very positive towards the Chilean variety. Finally, in general, informants value positively and negatively phonetic aspects of other varieties of Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, results of a study on the geographic variation of the phoneme /r/ in the speech of Chilean professionals of eight different cities (Iquique, La Serena, Valparaíso, Santiago, Concepción, Temuco, Coyhaique y PuntaArenas) perfonning a reading-aloud task are presented. The results show that most of the realizations for the phoneme /r/ correspond to the approximant, apicoalveolar consonant [ɹ], regardless of the participant's geographical origin and the gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, results of a study on the geographic variation of the phoneme /r/ in the speech of Chilean professionals of eight different cities (Iquique, La Serena, Valparaiso, Santiago, Concepción, Temuco, Coyhaique y Punta Arenas) performing a reading-aloud task are presented. The results show that most of the realizations for the phoneme /r/ correspond to the approximant, apicoalveolar consonant [ɹ], regardless of the participant's geographical origin and the gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many procedures to describe F0 contours in acoustic-phonetic terms. Garrido’s (1996, 2001, 2010) and z-score normalization systems have the advantage that they are automatic procedures. Therefore, this paper aims at analyzing both systems in order to determine the possible future application for the analysis of Spanish as a Foreign Language spoken by Brazilians (SFL). To do so, we analyze the melodic curves in declaratives, yes-no questions and wh-questions in Madrid Spanish, in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) spoken in the city of São Paulo and finally, in SFL. The validity of both systems was tested through a perception test with 10 Brazilian and 10 Spanish listeners. Listeners rated the degree of similarity between the signals with original intonation and signals with stylized F0 contours. The results showed that Garrido’s automatic stylization method is really able to perceptually create representations equivalent to the original ones in Spanish, BP and SFL and also better than those obtained with the procedure based on z-score normalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to be a direct contribution to Spanish teachers wanting to resolve phonetic problems in an Italian-speaking classroom. After examining the concept of phonetic correction and the various strategies to achieve it, the paper proposes a five-point plan inspired on the principles of the verbo-tonal method and based on the differences between Spanish and Italian regarding tension and quantity and on the ratio between the final result and the time required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to carry out a comparative sociolinguistic analysis of intervocalic obstruent consonant /d/ variation in urban Granada and Malaga (Spain). To do so, two perfectly comparable spoken corpuses gathered in the frame of the PrESEEa-Project were used. Given that /d/ deletion is quite frequent in southern varieties of Castilian Spanish, our analysis zoomed in on consonant deletion vs. maintenance regardless of the differences of intensity or tension perceptible in maintained consonantal variants. Prior to the comparative analysis itself, an exhaustive bivariate analysis was performed considering both linguistic and speaker (stylistic and social) variables, as well as their respective interaction. Therefore, we carried out two multivariate comparative analyses, the first one involving separate parallel analyses of data from both corpuses and the second one being an integrated analysis of the whole data. Results were amazingly similar for both towns and tend to confirm those obtained for other areas both in Spain and America, basically regarding the fundamental weight of internal factors on /d/ variation (i.e. consonant maintenance in word-roots vs. deletion in morphemes). However, they contradict most of previous results with regard to the effect of the speaker variables (i.e. younger speakers' leadership on /d/ deletion). Finally, conflict sites reveal sharper social stratification and age differences in Malaga than in Granada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to throw some light on a chapter not too studied in the history of Spanish Phonetics, the miscellaneous works from the 18th century, through the personality of Juan Antonio González de Valdés and his Ortopeia Universal (1785). We pursue three objectives: (i) place this text in the Spanish orthoepist tradition, (ii) discuss the beginning of a new kind of works in Spain that combines orthoepic data of particular languages with notions of general Phonetics, and (iii) analyze the connections between the Ortopeia and samples of other European traditions, specifically De Brosses' Traité de la formation méchanique des langues (1765). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a controversy about the inclusion of the Guaraní language in the bilingual education system of Paraguay. The controversy is the result of the country's complex sociolinguistic reality: Guaraní is an official language and an important emblem of national identity, but also a language of inferior status to Spanish, which is known as a situation of "diglossia". Moreover the speakers have negative attitudes towards their own speech practices, characterized by phenomena of convergence and mixing. This, some scholars identified as a "second order diglossia" between everyday discourse and the speech community's ideological construction of "real" Guaraní. In a controversial measure, government language planners have accredited a "hybrid" Guaraní version that would allow language borrowings from Spanish to remedy this situation and to facilitate the teaching of Guaraní, bringing the official version closer to everyday speech. This measure caused a heated debate about the version of Guaraní that should be used in education. The debate will be used here to explore the dominant language ideologies in the country that are responsible for the difficulties in bilingual education and for the ambiguities in the use of and attitudes towards Guaraní. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition of a foreign language phonology is guided/ conditioned by many factors (psychological, cognitive, linguistic, environmental, sociolinguistic, cultural, etc.). In this paper I analyze the influence of three sociolinguistic variables (sex, language level and type of formal instruction) on the acquisition of English /v/ by native speakers of Spanish. The corpus comprises 48 interviews with Montevidean participants (Montevideo, Uruguay) with different levels of competence in English and in two different classroom situations: bilingual schools and language institutes. The analysis proves that the students' interphonology can be described and explained by an in-depth study of the variation patterns their speech shows between the target language sound [v] and the Spanish-English interphonological variant [b]. A close look at how the three sociolinguistic variables -in isolation and combined- operate in the acquisition of /v/ also sheds light on theoretical issues of interest for sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often data that should be written so they are not identical due to misspellings and typos, variations in word order, use of prefixes and suffixes, among others. Phonetic techniques for duplicate detection are not geared toward the Spanish language, which makes the identification and correction of problems such as spelling errors in texts written in this language. In this research paper we propose an algorithm called PhoneticSpanish to detect duplicate text strings which considers the presence of spelling errors in Spanish. The proposed algorithm was compared with nine techniques to detect duplicates. The results were satisfactory and the algorithm that performed better than the other techniques and demonstrate opportunities for improved analysis of information in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose some guidelines for the classification of phonetic-phonological adjustments (Clasificación de Ajustes Fondtico-Fonológicos, CLAFF). Such guidelines are intended to describe and classify, from a phonetic-articulatory point of view, the adjustments that boys and girls make when, according to the standard Chilean Spanish phonological model, they unsuccessfully try to utter oral statements. These guidelines include 21 phonetic-articulatory parameters that enable to comprehensively describe the quantitative and qualitative articulatory behaviour shown in normal children's speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to quantify the socioeconomic importance of seven phonetic characteristics (seseo, yeismo, /s/-aspiration, /x/-aspiration, /j/-assibilation, /r/-assibilation, and /n/-velarization) whose presence or absence allows distinguishing among twenty-four Spanish dialects. In order to accomplish this goal, we perform a least-square regression analysis to calculate "hedonic prices" for the abovementioned characteristics. The result is that the three more significant characteristics, which seem to operate as signs of a lower per-capita income, are seseo, /x/-aspiration and /r/-assibilation. The first of those characteristics keeps its statistical significance as a sociolinguistic marker when we restrict our analysis to the case of Spain, while /r/-assibilation keeps its statistical significance when we restrict our database to Colombian observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]