An experimental approach to hypercorrection in Dominican Spanish

Abstract

A stigmatized trait of popular Dominican Spanish is the insertion of pre-consonantal or final [s] into a lexical item (e.g. Ja [ s ] queline ) . The predominant explanation among phonologists for this uniquely Dominican phenomenon is that the uneducated are ‘lost-s’ speakers who do not know which words contain lexical /s/ so they insert [s] into any coda, subject to theoretical constraints (Nunez Cedeno, 1988a; Harris, 2002; Bradley, 2006). However, a sociolinguistic analysis of rural Dominicans revealed that the majority of ‘s-ful’ tokens realized in spontaneous speech were correct productions (Bullock et al., 2014). The present analysis reports the results of a follow-up, controlled study designed to assess whether speakers could perceive and correctly reproduce coda [s] equally well across different phonological contexts, or whether internal and external factors (gender, literacy, age) affect how a speaker lexically codes and produces novel ‘s-ful’ tokens.