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Article published In: Spanish in Context
Vol. 20:3 (2023) ► pp.411–437

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The role of perceptual salience in a strengthening sound change

A comparison of /j/ perception by Colombian and Dominican listeners

ORCiD logo with link | Minnesota State UniversityMankato
 | Princeton University
Published online: 9 January 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.20047.den
Abstract
The current study examines the extent to which perceptual factors may account for the emergence of assibilated variants of the alveopalatal approximant /j/ in two geographically remote varieties of Spanish. Participants from Medellin, Colombia and Santiago, Dominican Republic completed a discrimination task and a matched guise. Both tasks presented listeners with stimuli containing affricate [ʤ] and approximant [j] allophones of /j/. Participants were more accurate when discriminating between sound pairs that included the affricate allophone, suggesting that the presence of (af)frication is a salient acoustic cue upon which judgments are reliably made. Therefore, we argue that the emergence of assibilated variants ([ʤ], [ʒ]) can be explained in part by more prominent acoustic cuing and thus greater perceptual salience. Evidence of the relationship between these findings and a possible sound change in progress is observed in the association of social characteristics with [ʤ] and [j].
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of literature
    • 2.1Phonetics of /j/ and synchronic variation
    • 2.2Variation and change in /j/
    • 2.3Perceptual salience
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Experiment design
      • 3.2.1Discrimination
      • 3.2.2Matched guise
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Discrimination
    • 4.2Matched guise
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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