Weakening of Intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish

Abstract

This study describes the weakening of intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish and investigates the role of several potential conditioning factors, including morphological, lexical and probabilistic variables. Three acoustic parameters were examined: voicing, the difference in high-band (4–8 kHz) intensity between /s/ and the following vowel, and the duration of the dip in low-band (0–1.5 kHz) intensity in /s/. Over a third of the /s/ consonants exhibited uninterrupted voicing. All three parameters were highly sensitive to speech rate and, less consistently, to prosodic factors such as word position and stress. We also found that /s/ suffixes in redundant morphosyntactic contexts were more prone to weakening than other word-final /s/ segments. Several high-frequency words were particularly prone to weakening, but no general probabilistic effects were observed for factors claimed to favor reduction such as word frequency, contextual predictability or grammatical class. These findings demonstrate the complex variability characteristic of reduction phenomena in spontaneous speech.