Phonetics and Phonology of Ibero-Romance Languages: An Introduction to the Special Issue

This Special Issue includes twelve articles that provide an insight into the phonetics and phonology of Ibero-Romance languages. It showcases the breadth of approaches to these languages and how crucial they have been in several theoretical and methodological advances related to these fields. Thus, the articles included in this issue not only speak to researchers working on Ibero-Romance languages but also to a wider audience by highlighting how research on these languages contributes to general phonological and phonetic debates. Focusing on synchronic phenomena, this Special Issue comprises studies that focus on different aspects of the Ibero-Romance sound systems, including the sub-segmental, segmental, and prosodic levels, and cover a wide range of topics from advancements in phonological theory based on new data and new theoretical approaches to long-standing phonological issues to laboratory approaches to phonology, issues concerning the phonetics–phonology interface, experimental phonetics including acoustic, articulatory, and perception experiments, and sociophonetics. While the range of contributions within this Special Issue is broad, several threads emerge in terms of their significance for Ibero-Romance phonetics and phonology. Romance scholars have long been at the forefront of laboratory phonology (Gibson & Gil, 2019), and several studies in this Issue present new data that has theoretical importance for phonological processes such as resyllabification and rhotic allophony in Ibero-Romance varieties. Other articles frame new formal analyses to phenomena within Optimality Theory, such as vowel harmony and morphophonological alternations, explored in earlier studies that crucially, as the authors highlight, lacked empirical evidence to provide comprehensive accounts. Overall, the articles in this Special Issue include a wealth of data on Ibero-Romance sounds that authors discuss in relation to new understandings of language change, sociophonetics, and bilingual perception, in addition to the topics already mentioned. In what follows, I provide a summary for each article following a framework that highlights how the contributions tie together.

Couched within Optimality Theory (OT), Davis and Pollock present a new analysis of Eastern Andalusian Spanish (EAS) plural laxing, which, according to traditional descriptions, occurs when the word-final plural morpheme /s/ is deleted and the preceding vowel laxes, affecting also any preceding mid vowel. The authors’ approach is informed by acoustic data from previous studies and consultations with native speakers focusing on the Granada variety of EAS. Based off those empirical observations, their analysis departs from previous accounts and argues that the plural morpheme is not represented by /s/ in EAS but rather by a floating [-ATR] feature that is anchored to the right edge of a word to satisfy alignment constraints. The authors further extend their alignment analysis to nouns whose singular ends with a stressed vowel, a case that has not been systematically analyzed in previous OT approaches. To conclude, they show how their proposed analysis can account for other patterns of EAS plural laxing reported in the literature. Also working within OT, Lozano and Bradley present a comparative analysis of diminutive formation across three Hispano-Romance varieties: Judeo-Spanish, Colombian Spanish, and Castilian Spanish. The first two present a dissimilatory alternation between diminutive suffix allomorphs, while the last one does not. Diminutive suffixation has attracted attention within contemporary Hispano-Romance linguistics; the authors contribute by considering iterative diminutives, i.e., forms where there is an iteration of the diminutive suffix that gives rise to intensified diminutives. Lozano and Bradley, first, present a description of the alternation in Judeo-Spanish and Colombian Spanish diminutives and identify new patterns for iterated diminutives in Colombian Spanish based on corpus data. Next, the authors develop a comprehensive phonological analysis of simple and iterated diminutivization where the alternations surface from the interaction among constraints on prosodic unmarkedness, output–output correspondence, allomorph preference, and similarity avoidance and, more precisely, dissimilation is formalized as the local self-conjunction of markedness constraints. In this OT analysis, the diminutive alternations are phonologically conditioned by consonantal place dissimilation.

Beristein presents a study that aims to provide evidence from aerodynamic data for a phonological process. More precisely, the author examines resyllabification of consonants as onsets across words in Spanish and utilizes degree of vowel nasalization before and after a resyllabified nasal consonant as a diagnostic for syllabic structure. Previous laboratory studies have questioned complete resyllabification and provided evidence for incomplete resyllabification; Beristein adds to this debate by expanding the analysis to surrounding vowels and applying articulatory methods. Namely, the author examines the nasal airflow of Northern Peninsular speakers as they produce words with different syllabic structures, including resyllabification contexts. The study reports that anticipatory and carryover nasalization among heterosyllabic sequences is not affected by resyllabilifcation, i.e., derived onsets lead to similar nasalization as “true” onsets, leading Beristein to conclude that Spanish phonology displays complete resyllabification. Also with a goal of informing phonological accounts, Ramsammy and Raposo de Medeiros report acoustic and articulatory data from ultrasound tongue imaging on rhotic variation in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The authors analyze data from speakers from São Paulo to present a thorough description of rhotic production using categorical and continuous measures, against the backdrop of a theoretical debate on the phonological analysis of rhotic allophony in Portuguese. Results from their quantitative analysis show categorical alternations among two or three types of rhotics, depending on the speaker, and acoustic and articulatory variability within those variants conditioned by prosodic context. More precisely, the authors report the strengthening of rhotic allophones at major prosodic boundaries. In conclusion, this study presents fine-grained phonetic variability that challenges previous phonological accounts of rhotics in BP, while the authors call for further research on the sociophonetics of rhotics in the language.

Recasens also presents ultrasound data but, in this case, to examine (co)articulatory patterns among consonant sequences in Catalan. The author examines articulatory and coarticulatory differences in such sequences based on manner of articulation, approximant vs. stop, and syllabic affiliation, complex onsets vs. heterosyllabic sequences. Focusing on velar approximants and stops preceded or followed by liquids, Recasens finds manner-related articulatory patterns such that approximants, besides being less constricted than stops as expected, also exhibit a retracted tongue body. In addition, results indicate that constriction degree is not affected by the preceding sound; however, the manner-dependent differences in tongue configuration mentioned earlier extend into a preceding liquid. This leads the author to propose that the approximant is produced with an active articulatory gesture, pre-planned during the preceding sound. Syllabic affiliation effects were also found: heterosyllabic consonants are produced with a more extreme lingual configuration and less gestural overlap. This last finding replicates observations for non-Romance languages; Recasens expands our understanding of the (co)articulatory features of approximants by bringing a Romance variety, Catalan, to the foreground.

In their article, Barbosa and Alvarenga examine prosody in a novel way by analyzing the connection between syllabic duration and F0 contours in BP. Through acoustic analysis of a corpus of story retellings by speakers from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the authors quantify the convergence between syllabic duration maxima, derived from the normalization of V-to-V intervals, and four F0 descriptors, F0 median and range and F0 rise and fall mean rates, in three distinct prosodic functions: non-terminal and terminal boundaries and prominence. The results reveal an alignment between duration maxima and F0 events in unique ways depending on the function, with non-terminality correlating with quicker F0 rises synchronized with duration maxima, and prominence presenting a wider F0 range and an earlier association between the duration maxima and an F0 fall. In addition, preliminary dialectal and gender-based differences emerge that, as the article highlights, merit further investigation. Prosody is also explored by Delgado, but from the perspective of intonational patterns and language contact. This article presents a first exploration into the intonation of Basque-French speakers in Labourd by analyzing yes–no questions in French. Following the Autosegmental Metrical Model, Delgado reports that rising contours were the most common intonation pattern, as observed for other varieties of French; however, there are significant differences based on language dominance with falling contours occurring more frequently within the French-dominant group. This article is relevant for Ibero-Romance phonetics and phonology because it engages and provides a comparison with studies that explore the Basque-Spanish contact situation. Furthermore, the study is directly informed by findings and methodologies from previous research on the linguistic situation of Spanish in the Basque Country. In including Delgado’s work in this Special Issue, the boundaries of Ibero-Romance are being expanded to give a broader perspective of the linguistic reality of Basque contact across national borders.

González, Cox and Isgar investigate the impact of prosodic structure on non-modal voicing in word-final vowels in Spanish through a reexamination of the dataset in González et al. (2022). More precisely, the authors present a fine-grained analysis of word-final vowel phonation that includes an acoustics-based categorization of vowels according to creaky voice, breathy voice or devoicing, as well as a measure of spectral tilt, i.e., the difference in relative amplitude between the first and second harmonic (H1–H2). An innovative approach in their analysis is that the authors treat phonation as including dynamic combinations and identify vowels with single, double, and triple phonation. In fact, results show that vowels with double phonation are the most common, especially vowels beginning with modal voice and ending with breathy voice. Furthermore, the article reports that prosodic structure impacts phonation: modal voice is the most frequent type of phonation at the end of intermediate phrases, while creaky and breathy voice are the most common at the end of intonational phrases. Finally, the acoustic measure of H1–H2 differentiates between types of phonation, except for female speakers’ modal and creaky voice productions, validating the use of this measure to explore Spanish phonation. The study, which includes speakers from a range of Spanish varieties, paves the way for future, detailed investigations of dialectal differences in vowel phonation. Mendes also presents an acoustic investigation of laryngeal activity, but in this case the author explores the voicing profile of the plural morpheme <s> in BP. In traditional descriptions, this morpheme is described as a voiced fricative, especially in pre-vocalic contexts. However, Mendes presents evidence that the plural-marking fricative is undergoing a process of devoicing that departs from earlier accounts. The study is a quantitative investigation of the degree of voicing present during the fricative and what factors might be conditioning it, including surrounding phonological context, task type, and word frequency. Results confirm devoicing of the fricative before a pause and before a vowel; however, the voicing degree is higher in pre-vocalic than pre-pausal environments. In addition, a preceding voiced stop leads to more fricative voicing than a preceding voiceless one, but this effect is only present for pre-vocalic fricatives. Individual variation is conditioned by the post-fricative context with a higher degree of individual variation in pre-vowel than pre-pause contexts, leading Mendes to conclude that the voiceless fricative before a pause is relative stable compared to fricative voicing before a vowel. Within exemplar theory, the author hypothesizes that exemplars associated with traditionally prevocalic voiced fricatives are competing with an emerging sound pattern characterized by the fricative devoicing.

Pollock presents a sociophonetic study that analyzes an emergent alveolar variant of the Spanish post-alveolar affricate in the speech of politicians from central and southern Spain. The author conducts a corpus analysis of political speech where acoustic measures, i.e., the center of gravity of the frication period and the percent fricative duration in each affricate, as well as the auditory coding of the place of articulation, are used to determine the distribution of the two variants based on several linguistic and sociolinguistic factors. Pollock argues that the phonetic variation present in the data indeed suggests the production of two types of affricates. Results also indicate that alveolar affricates are favored before and after front vowels, suggesting a possible coarticulatory origin for these fronted affricates. In addition, alveolar realizations are associated with female speech, speakers from Madrid, scripted speeches and interviews with women, contexts, according to the author, traditionally associated with prestige and attention paid to speech. Pollock concludes that the alveolar affricate seems to be an incipient Labovian marker in the early stages of social stratification. The article ends with a call for more perceptual work to better determine the status of this new affricate among listeners from central and southern Spanish. Boomershine and Johnson present the only perception study in the Special Issue. Building off an earlier study (Boomershine et al., 2008), the authors examine the interaction between language experience and phonological perception by analyzing how sounds with allophonic versus phonemic status in Spanish and English are perceived by listeners from a range of English–Spanish bilingual experiences, including heritage speakers of Spanish, late bilinguals, and monolingual speakers. Results from a similarity rating task replicate previous findings that contrastive sounds are perceived as more dissimilar. The novel finding in this study is that Heritage speakers’ perception is very similar to that of monolingual and late bilingual L1 Spanish speakers but distinct from English speakers, indicating that early exposure to a language has a long-lasting impact on perception. The authors couch their findings withing the Exemplar Resonance Theory (Johnson, 2006) which predicts that perceived similarity among allophones is language-specific and influenced by the listener’s linguistic experience. However, Boomershine and Johnson’s data, which include non-words, challenge the model, which is built on lexical items only. The authors conclude that more research is needed into the perceptual system of Heritage speakers in other languages to elucidate other relevant factors beyond allophonic status.

Finally, Bäumler’s article on loanword phonology presents a quantitative corpus study of the adaptation of anglicisms into Spanish. The author explores several factors that may condition the degree of adaptation of English words to the Spanish phonology, namely whether imitation of the English word is present or grapheme–phoneme correspondence takes place, among speakers from Mexico City and Madrid. Analyzing data from a reading task, Bäumler finds that orthography plays a major role in loanword phonology, since 73% of the data presents adaptation to the grapheme–phoneme correspondences of Spanish. However, that general trend is conditioned by type of sound, with consonants being more frequently imported than vowels; country, with Mexicans imitating more than Spaniards; and language exposure and affinity, with higher scores for this variable leading to more imitation. The author calls for future work that compares speech from reading and spontaneous tasks and other Spanish varieties.

While the studies included in this Special Issue highlight the relevance of Ibero-Romance phonetics and phonology for a range of theoretical and methodological matters, the compilation is somewhat limited in its representation of less studied languages, varieties, or communities of speakers. Studies on stigmatized varieties, contact dialects, and minoritized and racialized communities would allow us to expand our theoretical models and test the boundaries of our methodological approaches. While there are efforts focused within this scope, future research would benefit from incorporating patterns from less studied varieties vis a vis dialects and groups of speakers that have been extensively researched. This observation also underscores another area that is explored to a limited degree in this Special Issue, namely comparative studies across Ibero-Romance varieties. Lozano and Bradley present an example of how such a study could be shaped, with their project signaling the relevance and fruitful prospects of research that compares, generalizes, and/or differentiates across Ibero-Romance languages and dialects. This kind of approach is important for phonological theory and would strengthen the explanatory power of any model for phonological processes. This becomes even more relevant for research within Optimality Theory, a phonological approach where typological predictions constitute its core. Ibero-Romance lends itself to OT factorial typologies, like some previous studies have demonstrated, and work in this vein is pivotal for exploring the reach of any phonological OT analysis.

Some studies in the Special Issue call for more research that connects perception and production. Empirical studies tend to compartmentalize these two systems, even though they are deeply interconnected, and several theories posit such a connection as one of their tenets. Strides in this direction have been made in sociophonetics; however, further research is necessary to fully understand the impact of production patterns in the processing and perception of speech. For example, socioacoustic studies might identify socially stratified patterns of variation; exploring the perception of that variation would help clarify questions such as whether the feature is a social marker, identifier, or stereotype. In addition, some studies find discrepancies between the production and perception of sociolinguistic speech patterns, problematizing conclusions based only on production data. In addition, examining both production and perception is not only important for sociophonetics but also for theories that model sound systems based on users’ experiences, such as exemplar-based and usage-based theories.