Las aproximantes [beta, delta, gamma] del español en habla espontánea

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an empirical, descriptive and instrumental research, where the different realizations of the Spanish sounds /b, d, g/ have been sistematically analysed in order to obtain an acustic characterization of its approximant variants, when they appear within authentic communicative situations. The data has been extracted from a corpus of spontaneous speech which containins 90 utterances, more than 6 hours of recorded material taken from different TV shows. The analysis has been performed using Praat, a software that provides high quality spectrographics and phonetic analysis tools. These type of sounds, probably the most controversial within the Spanish phonetic and phonological systems, have been characterized extracting the relevant acustic features from the observation of the analysis results. Moreover, these results differ from those of previous analysis carried out on laboratory speech, obtaining approximant realizations in contexts where an oclusive realization would be expected and viceversa, as well as fenomena like dispparition and merging of these sounds. We conclude, as to characterize the approximant sounds, that fricativity does not show on these sounds. Sonority, and in all cases formant estructure are their distinctive features.