Using social media as a source of analysable material in phonetics and phonology – lenition in Spanish

Abstract

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that alternative methods of data collection are necessary to continue working in certain fields of linguistics. This is a challenge for (socio)phoneticians and phonologists who have to rely on good quality sound but cannot do fieldwork or gather recordings in a traditional manner. In this paper, I show that audio recordings made via social media can help alleviate this problem. To this end, I compared samples from five speakers of dialectal Spanish recorded in a laboratory setting and via a social media application (WhatsApp). The analysis of temporal and spectral characteristics of consonants in postvocalic position shows that recordings made via social media can be successfully used for at least some types of sociophonetic analysis. They also provide some additional advantages for researchers: ease of data collection, potentially large speech corpora, and access to authentic, naturalistic speech which is uninhibited by laboratory conditions or the presence of a researcher and a professional recording device.