Torreira Francisco, Ernestus Mirjam
Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Phonetica. 2012;69(3):124-48. doi: 10.1159/000343635. Epub 2012 Dec 6.
This study describes the weakening of intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish and investigates the role of several potential conditioning factors, including morphological, lexical and probabilistic variables. Three acoustic parameters were examined: voicing, the difference in high-band (4-8 kHz) intensity between /s/ and the following vowel, and the duration of the dip in low-band (0-1.5 kHz) intensity in /s/. Over a third of the /s/ consonants exhibited uninterrupted voicing. All three parameters were highly sensitive to speech rate and, less consistently, to prosodic factors such as word position and stress. We also found that /s/ suffixes in redundant morphosyntactic contexts were more prone to weakening than other word-final /s/ segments. Several high-frequency words were particularly prone to weakening, but no general probabilistic effects were observed for factors claimed to favor reduction such as word frequency, contextual predictability or grammatical class. These findings demonstrate the complex variability characteristic of reduction phenomena in spontaneous speech.
本研究描述了尼美根随意西班牙语语料库中词中 /s/ 的弱化情况，并调查了几个潜在制约因素的作用，包括形态、词汇和概率变量。研究考察了三个声学参数：浊音化、/s/ 与后续元音之间的高频段（4 - 8千赫）强度差异，以及 /s/ 中低频段（0 - 1.5千赫）强度下降的持续时间。超过三分之一的 /s/ 辅音呈现出不间断的浊音化。所有这三个参数对语速都高度敏感，对诸如词位和重音等韵律因素的敏感度则不太一致。我们还发现，在冗余形态句法语境中的 /s/ 后缀比其他词尾 /s/ 片段更容易弱化。几个高频词尤其容易弱化，但对于那些据称有利于弱化的因素，如词频、语境可预测性或语法类别，未观察到一般的概率效应。这些发现证明了自发言语中弱化现象的复杂变异性特征。
