Large-scale analysis of Spanish /s/-lenition using audiobooks

Given forced alignment and accurate automatic phonetic classification and measurement, audiobooks are an important potential source of large-scale evidence about phonetic variation. For example, the audiobook version of the novel La Casa de los Espiritus, read by two Chilean actors, presents 17 hours of audio containing nearly 67,000 /s/ segments, distributed in a natural way across a wide variety of prosodic, lexical, morphological, syllabic, and phonetic environments. Thus we believe that this one audiobook offers more /s/ tokens than have been examined in the entire 50-year history of sociolinguistic study of Spanish /s/-lenition -- and analysis on this scale allows statistical evaluation of a much larger set of hypotheses about phonetic variation and its conditioning factors. For broad comparison of geographical variants, we can use audiobooks whose readers exhibit a variety of accent types, in this case comparing works read by Chilean, Argentinian, Mexican, and Peninsular speakers. Most of the sociolinguistic literature on variation in Spanish syllable-final /s/ treats it as involving three distinct categories: retained [s], aspirated [h], and deletion. In our data we see coherent gradient variation in the duration, frication strength, and laryngeal coarticulation of /s/, with aspiration, deletion and voicing as continuum endpoints.Given forced alignment and accurate automatic phonetic classification and measurement, audiobooks are an important potential source of large-scale evidence about phonetic variation. For example, the audiobook version of the novel La Casa de los Espiritus, read by two Chilean actors, presents 17 hours of audio containing nearly 67,000 /s/ segments, distributed in a natural way across a wide variety of prosodic, lexical, morphological, syllabic, and phonetic environments. Thus we believe that this one audiobook offers more /s/ tokens than have been examined in the entire 50-year history of sociolinguistic study of Spanish /s/-lenition -- and analysis on this scale allows statistical evaluation of a much larger set of hypotheses about phonetic variation and its conditioning factors. For broad comparison of geographical variants, we can use audiobooks whose readers exhibit a variety of accent types, in this case comparing works read by Chilean, Argentinian, Mexican, and Peninsular speakers. Most of the sociol...