On the Production and Perception of Spanish Palatal Obstruents: An Acoustic Phonetic Study with Implications for Phonology, Dialectology, and Pedagogy

Abstract

The present paper is just one part of a larger study, still in progress, which brings to the table an array of phonetic details that add to our understanding of the behavior of <y> on four fronts: (1) a comparison of the production and reception of various palatal variants by native Spanish speakers and English­ speaking students of the language: (2) the behavior of the palatal obstruent phoneme in other Spanish dialects, especially those in which the consonant is known to weaken or delete intervocalically (Lipski 1094); (3) resyllabification of the wordy 'and' with a following vowel; and (4) resyllabification contexts in which word-final <y> is followed by a vowel.