Variación fonética y el efecto de la audiencia: el debilitamiento de /s/ en dos géneros musicales

Abstract

In River Plate Spanish, /s/ weakens to [h] before a consonant but is maintained before a vowel or a pause. In other Spanish varieties, such as the Spanish of Madrid, México or Bogota, /s/ weakening is not frequent. We assume here that River Plate Spanish speakers can partly control their rate of /s/-weakening to approach either the local standards or a Pan-Hispanic norm. To evaluate this hypothesis, we use a corpus of 17 songs grouped in two genres (tango and rock) and, for each genre, we compare the rate of /s/-aspiration in the songs performed by one singer (Andrés Calamaro) with the same songs sung by other interpreters. A multiple-regression analysis reveals that the variables 'genre' and 'interpreter' significantly predict the differences in the aspiration rates, and indicates that the same singer approaches the River Plate Spanish rates in the more local genre (tango) but converges towards a general norm in the more international genre (rock).