PhonDi Discussion Group

Nick Henricksen will speak on "Consonant gemination in Andalusian Spanish: Production and perception."

Abstract
Spanish is often described as a language that lacks word-internal geminate consonants. This study explores an ongoing sound change in Andalusian Spanish whereby /ɾn/ and /ɾl/ sequences undergo gemination (i.e., [n:] and [l:], respectively), due to phonetic assimilation of clusters involving coronal sonorants. This change now creates a lexical contrast between non-geminate [n]/[l] and geminate [n:]/[l:] in pairs orthographically represented as pela ‘s/he peals’ - perla ‘pearl’, cala ‘cove’ - Carla ‘Carla’, and tono ‘tone’ - torno ‘window’, among others. In this presentation we will present data from two production experiments and two perception experiments. For all four experiments, we collected data from speakers of a geminating variety (from Andalusia, Spain), as well as from speakers of a non-geminating variety (from Castile, Spain).