Durational cues to resyllabification in Spanish

Word-final consonants in Spanish are post-lexically resyllabified when followed by an onsetless syllable, e.g. venden aves (‘they sell birds’) is traditionally syllabified as ven.de.na.ves and is considered homophonous with vende naves (‘he sells ships’). This study analyzes such two-word minimal pa...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Jiménez-Bravo Bonilla, Miguel, Lahoz Bengoechea, José María
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/100202
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/100202
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Spanish
Resyllabification
Duration
Articulatory gestures
Ambisyllabicity
Lengua española
Lingüística
5705.05 Fonética
5705.06 Fonología
Descripción
Sumario:Word-final consonants in Spanish are post-lexically resyllabified when followed by an onsetless syllable, e.g. venden aves (‘they sell birds’) is traditionally syllabified as ven.de.na.ves and is considered homophonous with vende naves (‘he sells ships’). This study analyzes such two-word minimal pairs inserted in prosodically equivalent sentences read from a list and provides measurements of the acoustic duration of resyllabified /s/, /n/, and /l/, and of their flanking vowels. A mixed-model analysis showed that, when resyllabified as derived onsets, all three consonants pattern together and show a shorter duration (venden aves) in comparison with canonical onsets (vende naves). This is consistent with the coda position that they occupy in the lexical representation, given the weak nature of codas. However, vowel duration varies according to consonant identity. These results are discussed in terms of the articulatory gestures making up the target consonants and allow to interpret that the resyllabified consonant actually becomes the onset of the following syllable. Therefore, we offer converging evidence of resyllabified consonants acting both as codas and onsets, and consequently we propose they can be analyzed as ambisyllabic.