Voice onset time of spontaneously spoken Spanish voiceless stops

Abstract

Spectrographic measurements were made of voice onset time for 161 tokens of Spanish voiceless stops from one individual's conversational speech in an attempt to replicate laboratory findings on VOT. In running Spanish, occlusive allophones of voiced-stop phohemes occur only in absolute initial position and after nasal consonants. In other environments, voiced-stop phonemes are phonetically voiced fricatives. Therefore the contrast between voiced- and voiceless-stop phoneme categories is maintained not only by the presence or absence of voicing, but also by the presence of frication (voiced phonemes) or its absence (i.e., closure for voiceless phonemes). Due to the limited distribution of voiced-stop allophones, these are scarcely represented in the present sample, and their VOT values are not reported. In spite of VOT's “reduced” work load, however, the VOT values for voiceless stops in this study conform quite closely to earlier observations of production and perception of Spanish stop phonemes. VOT values for voiceless stops in utterance-initial and post-nasal positions are not significantly different from those for stops in other positions.