Richard File-Muriel

Lexical frequency and s-realization in Barranquilla, Colombia

The role of lexical frequency in the weakening of syllable-final lexical-s in the Spanish of Barranquilla, Colombia

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This book reports on a quantitative analysis of /s/
in words of different lexical frequencies in a
cohesive speech community. Speakers from
Barranquilla, Colombia between 20-26 years of age
read approximately 100 sentences, containing words
with s + consonant sequences. These productions were
submitted to auditory acoustical analysis; visual
inspection of spectrograms was carried out for
ambiguous cases in which the strong sibilance that
characterizes /s/ was not clear. The findings reveal
that the single most important factor conditioning
s-realization is lexical frequency. Speakers tend
towards full articulation of /s/ in low-frequency
words, while weakening it in high-frequency words.
The importance of this factor becomes more apparent
when one examines a wider range of the frequency
scale than what is attested in conversational speech.
These findings support models of language which
incorporate lexical frequency as a central component
in explaining variations across words in both
individual and communal grammars.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller
• Seitenzahl: 204
• Englisch
• Gewicht: 290g
• ISBN-13: 9783639121803
• ISBN-10: 3639121805
• Artikelnr.: 25935471

Autorenporträt

Richard J. File-Muriel was born 9/17/1972 in Normal, Illinois
(USA). At the time he authored this book, the general focus of
his linguistic research was phonetic and phonological variation
and change, primarily of a segmental nature. He and his wife live
between Colombia and the United States.