EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION OF THE PHONEMIC STATUS OF OPEN AND CLOSED VOWELS IN SPANISH

The phoneme /s/ appEars as the sibilant [s] in standard Spanish and
has a high functional load. In those dialects of Spanish in which /s/ -->
[ø], however, the question arises as to how, apart from context, those
morphological distinctions carried by /s/ are maintained. This study attempts
to verify experimentally the often-repeated hypothesis that a compensatory
phonemic change in quality takes place in the vowel immediately preceding this
[ø] allophone of /s/ in syllable-final and word-final positions.
Speech samples were elicited from four native speakers of Cuban Spanish;
a perception test was constructed from these samples and was administered to
20 test subjects. The items used on the perception test were also studied
spectrographically.
In neither the acoustic nor the perceptual portions of this study could
we find evidence of any phonemicization of differences in vowel quality before
word-final /s/ --> [ø].
This investigation did show that vowel length is phonemic, in this particular
dialect of Spanish, in syllable-final position before /s/ appearing as
[ø]. A significant increase in vowel length provided the test subjects used
in this study with sufficient acoustic cues to correctly discriminate pairs
of words such as patillas [patiyas] and pastillas [paøtiyas] at a rate of 91.6%.