430: Inter-Dialectal Perception in Spanish

Presenter(s)

Maddie Hannon

Abstract or Description

This study investigates the perception of regional dialects within the Spanish language. We focus on designing a pilot study to explore how listeners with a varied degree of contact categorize assibilated variants of Spanish rhotics. Assibilated variants characteristic to the speech of Argentina represent only a sliver of the linguistic variation that the Spanish language has developed over the 500 years of its establishment and diffusion throughout the world. Due to the sheer amount of linguistic variation across Spanish dialects, perception studies are necessary to understand how speakers communicate with one another. Recent research reveals that inter-dialectal speech perception depends, among a variety of factors, on listeners' own phonemic and allophonic inventory (i.e. the sounds of the dialect), contact, or experience with other dialects, and even geographic proximity. Latin American Spanish speakers will complete an identification task of pairs of sounds that are acoustically and perceptually similar to examine the interpretation of linguistic categories and intelligibility across Spanish dialects.