Advancing sociophonetic analysis of fricative merger(s) and split in Andalusian Spanish
Based on 19,420 tokens from read speech (passage reading, word list) by 80 speakers (40 male, 40 female; ages 18-87), this study analyzes Andalusian coronal fricative variation in Huelva and Lepe, Spain. The aim of the study was three-fold: (i) to provide acoustic evidence of the fricative demerger; (ii) to determine which acoustic parameters best explain this variation; (iii) to promote a fricative Demerger Index, a novel methodological approach that provides degrees of demerger that avoids effects of sex-based spectral differences. Mixed effect linear regression models indicated that those with the largest demerger were females, younger speakers, those from Huelva, and in more formal styles; COG, Mean Intensity, Skewness, and Variance were the most adequate acoustic measures. Implications are that the fricative Demerger Index provides a gradient analysis that compares between-speaker variation only after calculating within-speaker variation, allowing researchers to observe degrees of demerger while avoiding sex-related spectral differences.
