Estudio fonético sobre las consonantes palatales del español en Waco, Texas

The phonetic study of the palatal consonants in Spanish spoken in Waco has not received the attention from scholars that it deserves. This community is in the central part of the state of Texas approximately 336 miles from the Mexico-United States border. Like other varieties of Spanish in this country, the Spanish in Waco has linguistic contact with English. Variation was studied in the speech production of the three most infrequent phonemes in Spanish: / ɲ/, / ʧ/, / ʝ/. There are phonetic (Ohala, 1993 and others) and sociolinguistic factors (Silva-Corvalán, 2001 and others) that have been attributed to linguistic variation and sound change. This study used two methods to elicit speech samples from 27 Spanish speakers that live in Waco. The speakers participated in a picture naming task and an interview. This resulted in the elicitation of 4,017 tokens that were analyzed and classified according to the phonetic variant of the phoneme. Four independent variables and one dependent variable were identified. The univariate analysis showed that the factors phoneme, generation and gender had a significant effect on the allophonic realization of the phonemes. The results indicated that the use of standard forms of the palatal phonemes is prevalent in the informal Spanish in this sample, although some degree of variation was present. First, there was more variability in the speech production of /ɲ/ than in the phonemes /ʧ/ and /ʝ/. There was also more variability in the speech of Generation 3 than in the first two generations, which was expected based on previous studies. There were minimal differences between the speech of male and female speakers. Given these results, there are some pending concerns about this variety of Spanish that may lead to a better understanding of its reality as a language in contact with English.