Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

1973

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Resnick, Melvyn C.

Abstract

The phoneme /s/ appEars as the sibilant [s] in standard Spanish and has a high functional load. In those dialects of Spanish in which /s/ --> [ø], however, the question arises as to how, apart from context, those morphological distinctions carried by /s/ are maintained. This study attempts to verify experimentally the often-repeated hypothesis that a compensatory phonemic change in quality takes place in the vowel immediately preceding this [ø] allophone of /s/ in syllable-final and word-final positions. Speech samples were elicited from four native speakers of Cuban Spanish; a perception test was constructed from these samples and was administered to 20 test subjects. The items used on the perception test were also studied spectrographically. In neither the acoustic nor the perceptual portions of this study could we find evidence of any phonemicization of differences in vowel quality before word-final /s/ --> [ø]. This investigation did show that vowel length is phonemic, in this particular dialect of Spanish, in syllable-final position before /s/ appearing as [ø]. A significant increase in vowel length provided the test subjects used in this study with sufficient acoustic cues to correctly discriminate pairs of words such as patillas [patiyas] and pastillas [paøtiyas] at a rate of 91.6%.

Extent

78 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 1973.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FADT13599

Format

pdf

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