Sociophonetic Investigation of the Spanish Alveolar Trill /r/ in Two Canonical-Trill Varieties

The hyper-variation present in rhotic sounds makes them particularly apt for sociophonetic research. This paper investigates the variable realization of the voiced alveolar-trill phoneme /r/ through an acoustic analysis of unscripted speech produced by 80 speakers of Spanish. Although the most common phonetic variant of /r/ contained two lingual constrictions, we find substantial inter-speaker variation in our data, ranging from zero to five lingual contacts. The results demonstrate that the variation in Spanish results from a systematic interaction of factors, deriving from well-documented processes of consonantal lenition (e.g., weakening in unstressed syllables) in addition to processes inherent to the trill's articulation (e.g., high-vowel antagonism). Importantly, speaker sex displayed the strongest effect among all the predictors, which leads us to consider the role of sociolinguistic factors, in addition to possible biomechanical differences, on /r/ production. We contextualize the findings within a literature that theorizes rhotic consonants as a single class of sounds despite remarkable patterns of cross-language and speaker-specific variation.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the variable realization of the voiced alveolar-trill phoneme /r/ in Spanish through acoustic analysis. The results show substantial inter-speaker variation, with factors such as consonantal lenition and trill articulation contributing to the variation. Importantly, speaker sex displays the strongest effect among all predictors, highlighting the role of sociolinguistic factors in /r/ production.