LingLunch : Johanna Cronenberg

Johanna Cronenberg (Université Paris Cité/ LLF)
The Sound Change from Pre- to Post-Aspiration in Andalusian Spanish: A Cognitive and Computational

In Andalusian Spanish, /s/ before /p, t, k/ is usually lenited to /h/, so a word like "pasta" is pronounced /pahta/. The plosive (in this example, /t/) is hence pre-aspirated. Recently, it has been reported that this pre-aspiration is giving way to post-aspiration (e.g. /pahta/ becomes /patha/). I will present two intertwined perspectives on this sound change. The first is concerned with the articulatory basis of this change which is hypothesised to be a re-synchronisation of the glottis and tongue movements. An acoustic and functional analysis of the speech of older/younger and East/West Andalusian speakers will support this cognitive perspective. The second perspective is computational and asks whether we can model the spread of the change in terms of population dynamics. A simulation was run using the agent-based model soundChangeR (https://github.com/IPS-LMU/soundChangeR) with the speech production data of our Andalusian Spanish speakers as input. The results suggest that our current, cognitively-inspired and exemplar-based approach does not model all aspects of the sound change under investigation.