The role of perception in yeísmo: A preliminary study with Catalan-speaking listeners

Abstract

Yeísmo, as a change in progress in the Spanish phonological system, has been studied from various perspectives, especially from dialectology and articulatory phonetics. However, the role of the listener in its origins and spread has been scarcely analysed. In fact, it is necessary to focus on the side of the listener to detect if the articulatory similarity of sounds [ʎ] and [j] can be perceptively ambiguous and, thus, confounded. The present work wants to examine this topic in order to determine how the innovative neutralization could initiate. With this purpose we have carried out a perception study which consisted of three different tests: the first one worked as control test and the other two were used to find out if the change could be related to signal reception problems or to opacities in the input segmentation. In these experiments, we have used samples from a Spanish speaker who upholded /ʎ/ and /ʝ/ distinction (second test) and from a yeísta speaker (third test). Despite our concern is to analyse the dephonologization of /?/ in Spanish, there is an important obstacle to achieve our goal: it is quite difficult to find Spanish speakers that do preserve the phonological distinction between /ʎ/ and /ʝ/ in the same way Spanish system once did. Therefore, we must rely on compared grammar: the judges of the perception tests were 20 Catalan speakers, a language that keeps this phonological contrast. The results display that 30 % of the stimulus from Spanish speakers were misinterpreted. In addition, data suggest that the presence of an adjacent palatal vowel and the occurrence in an unstressed position may favour the confusion and, hence, the recategorization process.