Introduction

This publication represents a study of lenition of syllable-final // in Latin American Spanish produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), catalog number LDC2001T60 and isbn 1-58563-196-5. The data used in this study came from three other LDC corpora, the CALLHOME Spanish Speech corpus, the CALLHOME Spanish Transcripts, and the CALLHOME Spanish Lexicon. It is a well-known fact that syllable-final /s/ is subject to lenition in many Latin American Spanish dialects. Lenition of -/s/ is a variable phonological process in which an -/s /may be aspirated (pronounced [h]) or deleted altogether. Lenition of -/s/ has been widely studied by sociolinguists, who have identified various linguistic and extralinguistic factors that favor the process. Since syllable-final /s /is frequent in Spanish, lenition has a great effect on overall pronunciation.

Data

Please see file.tbl for the directory structure of this publication, as well as a complete list of files. The primary data file consists of data stored in the following fields:

• Token id
• Code
• Confidence level
• Speaker id
• Header of the line in the transcript
• Words from the transcript
• Location of word in the speaker's turn
• Location of /s/ in the word
• Preceding segment
• Following segment
• Word stress pattern
• Following word stress pattern
• Word start time
• Word end time
• Length of pause following word
• Coder
• Speaker's dialect
• Speaker's sex
• Speaker's age
• Corrected following word
• Comment
• Morphological information

There are on the order of 3,000 - 4,000 missing occurences of syllable-final /s/ encodings. These omissions occur for two main reasons: changes in the transcriptions after the list of all of the syllable-final /s/ were generated, and the failure of some transcript lines to be automatically aligned.

For a more detailed description of this publication see the researcher's description in HTML or Microsoft Word format.

Content Copyright

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