Multidimensional acoustic space of /r/ variants in Corrientes, Argentina

MARTÍNEZ SOLER M, GURLEKIAN JA, UNIVASO P, COLANTONI L

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

Cambridge University Press

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2013

0025-1003

This work presents a description of rhotic variants in terms of a multidimensional space of acoustic features. Argentine Spanish introduces variations in the realization of phoneme /r/ that span across all its territory. The most noticeable contrast occurs between the region of Buenos Aires, with a trill, and the northern, central and Cuyo regions, with more or less assibilated variants. Also it has been reported a new trend in favor of approximant variants in the latter regions, due to a dissimilatory process between rhotics and palatals. This paper aims to: (1) present a multidimensional acoustic space for /r/ variants, taking the province of Corrientes variants as a test case, (2) analyze the variation present in some locations and between different age groups and (3) present a suitable method of acoustic measurements to distinguish these variants objectively. Results from ten informants from the towns of Goya, Corrientes and Sauce, aged between 18 and 42 years, indicate that the dissimilatory process is more advanced in the capital of the province, which has approximants and trills, while in the interior the unvoiced fricatives move mainly to the voiced fricative and approximants. Within the capital, trills are more frequent among younger informants. The proposed method could be used to automatically distinguish trills from the other two variants, and then to discriminate approximants from assibilated variants in large corpora.