Evidence for Incomplete Neutralization in Chilean Spanish

In Chilean Spanish, syllable- and word-final /s/ are frequently weakened to an [h]-like segment or completely deleted. In word-final position, /s/ serves as the plural morpheme, so its deletion renders a site for potential neutralization with singular items. Chilean scholars have previously described differences in the vowel preceding weakened or deleted /s/ distinguishing it from non-/s/-final words, but this putative incomplete neutralization has not yet been acoustically verified, nor have its conditioning factors been explored. The primary purpose of this study was to assess via phonetic analysis of spontaneous speech whether neutralization of final vowels in singular words and plural words in Chilean Spanish is indeed incomplete, as hypothesized by scholars during the 20th century. Additionally, these vowels were also compared to the vowels of monomorphemic /s/-final words in order to ensure that the attested singular-versus-plural differences were not simply indicative of closed syllable laxing processes.

Vowels were extracted from the spontaneous speech of 20 Chilean Spanish speakers and acoustically analyzed via VoiceSauce.

The results revealed that final /a/ vowels of plural words were found to be breathier than singular vowels but less breathy than the final vowels of monomorphemic words, and that plural /o/ was significantly fronted. They also demonstrated increased breathiness on /e/ vowels closed by /s/, regardless of morphological status.

These results provide the first account of incomplete neutralization of plural vowel correlates in spontaneous speech in Chilean Spanish, and they offer evidence for closed syllable processes in this particular dialect, in alignment with an exemplar-theoretic approach.