Consequences of prosodic variation for spatiotemporal organization in Spanish stop-lateral clusters

• Stavroula Sotiropoulou ^[1] ; Adamantios I. Gafos ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Potsdam

     University of Potsdam

     Kreisfreie Stadt Potsdam, Alemania

     
• Localización: Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, ISSN-e 2199-3386, ISSN 1939-0238, Vol. 17, Nº. 2, 2024, págs. 341-371
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • Using articulatory data from five Spanish speakers, we study how stop-lateral-vowel sequences respond to perturbations of phonetic parameters in the segments that compose them. Target words with stop-lateral complex onsets were embedded in different prosodic contexts. Regardless of prosodic context, stability-based indices for the presumed global organization of the elicited stop-lateral complex onsets do not show the expected patterns. Nevertheless, evidence for global organization does emerge in the presence of compensatory relations among phonetic parameters which vary as a result of prosodic modulations. Thus, as stop duration and the lag between the two consonants in a cluster increases, the vowel begins earlier in relation to the preceding lateral. Similarly, as the lag in the stop-lateral transition increases, lateral duration decreases. That is, local changes to some part of the sequence produces (language-particular) compensatory effects propagating to other parts of the sequence, in attestation of the global organization presiding over the entire stop-lateral-vowel sequence. We relate our results to independently observed properties usually associated with the idea that Spanish is a syllable-timed language and draw implications for the link between qualitative phonological organization and continuous phonetics.