The Role of Lexical Frequency in the Weakening of Syllable-Final Lexical /s/ in the Spanish of Barranquilla, Colombia

Abstract

This article reports on a quantitative analysis of /s/ in words of different lexical frequencies in a cohesive speech community. Speakers from Barranquilla, Colombia between 20―26 years of age read approximately 100 sentences, containing words with s + consonant sequences. These productions were submitted to auditory acoustical analysis; visual inspection of spectrograms was carried out for ambiguous cases wherein the strong sibilance that characterizes /s/ was not clear. Multivariate analysis of factors conditioning s-realization reveals that the single most important factor is lexical frequency. Speakers tend towards full articulation of /s/ in low-frequency words, while weakening it in high-frequency words. The importance of this factor becomes more apparent when one examines a wider range of the frequency scale than what is attested in conversational speech. These findings support models of language which incorporate lexical frequency as a central component in explaining variations across words in both individual and communal grammars.