Variable Production of the Trill in Spontaneous Speech: Sociolinguistic Implications

Abstract

The present investigation provides both an acoustic and multivariate analysis that contributes to our understanding of the status of trill variation in Venezuelan Spanish. Specifically, an acoustic analysis of the data is performed in order to determine the variants of /r/ in this variety of Spanish. Furthermore, the role of age, gender, and socioeconomic background in the production of the trill is examined. The present paper demonstrates that the most common variants in this dialect are the approximant and the trill with two closures. A multivariate analysis based on 2,369 tokens shows that the factors of position within the word, number of syllables, grammatical category, age, gender and socioeconomic class all have an effect on the production of trill-like variants. Innovative variants are more likely to be found in younger speakers than in older ones; this may be considered evidence that trill variation is a change in progress.