Stop lenition in Canary Islands Spanish – a motion capture study

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the phonological and prosodic effects of lenition in Canary Islands Spanish using new methodology. In the course of a motion capture study conducted in the field using an internet camera, we show that lip tracking can help disentangle several problems related to the contexts of stop lenition. First, we show that there is no post-consonantal lenition of stops in the studied variety of Spanish. We also show that the same kind of lenition blocking occurs after a preceding consonant is deleted, which supports containment-based approaches to phonological analysis as well as gestural masking effects. Furthermore, we show that lip aperture, as opposed to acoustic measurements, points to differences between stops produced in focus and non-focus positions, which constitutes an added value in studying lenition. All in all, we show that capturing lip movements is a viable method in investigating consonantal constriction and that studies on the subject would benefit from combining easy-to-use articulation tracking with acoustic analysis.