Pronouncing the Impossible: Illicit Sequences as a Result of Phonetic Reduction in Spanish Casual Speech

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Milner, Katherine
Area of Honors:
Linguistics
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Matthew Thomas Carlson, Thesis Supervisor
Michael Travis Putnam, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
phonetic reduction
phonotactics
speech perception
perceptual repair
prothesis
Abstract:
This thesis explores the complex relationships between phonetic reduction, illusory vowel perception, and phonotactic repair hidden within the “illusory vowel” phenomenon observed in the L2 English speech of by L1 Spanish speakers, in which [e] is epenthesized before word-initial /s/-consonant clusters. Previous research by Carlson and McAllister (2019), which is very limited, has investigated this phenomenon exclusively in highly controlled settings, so this thesis aims to observe it in a natural setting. To improve ecological validity, this study gathered its data from a corpus of casual Spanish speech produced by L1 Madrid Spanish speakers (Torreira & Ernestus, 2010). Utterances containing words that began with an unstressed vowel preceding an /s/-consonant cluster—as well as those preceding an /s/-vowel cluster—were excerpted and these target words were coded impressionistically based on auditory inspection as well as examination of the waveform and spectrogram. In accordance with this paper’s theoretical claims, the results of data analysis found that the Spanish speakers in the corpus often reduced /e/ in word-initial, unstressed positions before /s/-consonant clusters. It also suggested that forms of the word estar, the largest category present in the data, may behave differently from all other targets, showing a higher frequency of elision than even those that followed the same phonological pattern.