Abstract

UGUETO, Marluis  and  GONZALEZ, Jorge. Acoustic analysis of /r/ in final position in the speech of Caracas. Letras [online]. 2013, vol.55, n.89, pp.19-47. ISSN 0459-1283.

In Spanish, the liquid vibrant phonemes /ɾ-r/, in a non-intervocalic position do not neutralize themselves into the vibrant archiphoneme /R/. In post nuclear position, /R/ experiences a phonic instability, which is a feature of the Spanish consonants in such context, and manifests itself in a variety of forms, in realizations of a different acoustic nature. In this study the variants [ɾ], [ɹ], ø and others, ([h], [r], [rɹ]) de /R/, are analyzed in an acoustic and articulator way, in word final position as they appear in Spanish from Caracas, by means of techniques drawn from instrumental phonetics. The corpus consisted of 720 cases of post nuclear /R/, extracted from the PRESEEA-Caracas corpus 2004-2011. The acoustic analysis was performed with the program Speech Analyzer 3.0.1. The results show that the spectrographic composition of [ɾ] and [ɹ] can be made up of two phases: the closing or approximant phase, and a vocalic phase; and that the variant [ɾ] is more frequent in the Spanish variety spoken in Caracas.

Keywords : acoustic phonetics; vibrant archiphoneme; Venezuelan Spanish.