| Resumo: | This paper focuses on the phonetic implementation of /s/ and /r/ preceding nasal -n in the variety of Spanish spoken in the western Andalusian province of Seville (henceforth WAS). In a large number of Spanish dialects /s/ and /r/ in coda position are aspirated or deleted, suffering a weakening process usually known in the field of Linguistics as «lenition». This phenomenon has been very well documented in the literature ―especially concerning the phonological erosion and loss of final /s/― as it represents the morphological marker of plurality in nouns and second person singular in verbs. Since both the sibilant and the vibrant phonemes undergo lenition word-internally and word-finally, a key question to be posited would be whether /s/ and /r/ in an environment preceding -n could be phonetically neutralized, resulting in cases of mergers as in the examples bosna y borna, whose underlying representations /bosna/&/borna/ would surface as [boh·na]. My experiment examines the hypothesis of a complete neutralization of contrastive supralaringeal features of /s/ and /r/ in offset position preceding onset /n/. In this analysis, I present evidence from two controlled studies, one acoustic and the other perceptive, that, on the one hand, /s/ and /r/ are not aspirated preceding /n/ in WAS, but instead they suffer phonetic zero without leaving any phonological cues, and are replaced by the regressive germination of the nasal segment; and on the other hand, that to the Sevillian speaker's acoustic perception, minimal pairs as lerna/lesna represent cases of homophone words.
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