Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech Communication Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain September 30 - October 2, 1991

Some Aspects of Vowel Reduction in Spanish Spontaneous Speech

Bernard Harmegnies (1), Dolors Poch-Olivé (2)

(1) Service de phonétique et psychoacoustique, Université de Mons-Hainaut, Mons, Belgium
(2) Departament de filologia Espanyola, Laboratori de Fonetica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

The classical descriptions of Spanish vowels, both articulatory (Navarro Tomas, 1918) and acoustic (Navarro Tomas, 1916, 1917; Lacerda-Canellada, 1942; Monroy Casas, 1980; Quilis-Esgueva, 1983), all based upon laboratory speech, agree on the points that 1. the Spanish vocalic system is composed of five vowels (/i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/); 2. these are free of reduction (understood as an approximation to the schwa quality).

Nevertheless, as Lindblom (1963) notices, vowel reduction may derive from non- phonologic factors (stress, speech rate, etc.) that influence the acoustic characteristics of vowel utterances. These factors behave in different ways according to the different speech styles involved and produce [...] variations. Particularly, vowels in spontaneous Spanish speech seem to [...] relaxation (Poch, 1989) which approaches them to schwa, although this phenomenon is not sensible in laboratory speech.

In this paper, we will focus on these phenomena and try to determine whether variations in the speaking style (laboratory vs. spontaneous speech) result in vocalic variability. For this purpose, we will contrast vowels in sentences produced by a single speaker in invariant phonetic environment, and differences in speaking styles only.
Due to the bad quality of the paper copy parts of this abstract are incomplete.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Harmegnies, Bernard / Poch-Olivé, Dolors (1991): "Some aspects of vowel reduction in Spanish spontaneous speech", In PPoSpSt-1991, paper 031.