# More on Sibilant Devoicing in Spanish Diachrony: An Initial Phonetic Approach
## 2 The Acoustic Approach  
### Method  
The acoustic experiment investigates the characteristics regarding voicing of the sibilants /s, z/, /, 3/, /\(\widehat{\mathrm{s}}\), d\(\widehat{\mathrm{z}}\)/ and/\(\widehat{\mathrm{t}}\), d\(\widehat{\mathrm{s}}\)/ in Central and Majorcan Catalan. Since Catalan displays four pairs of sibilants, we decided to examine all of them, especially if we remember that Spanish also has the voiceless palatal affricate and that its voiced counterpart also existed in Medieval Spanish, even though it had no phonological status. Another reason to include the palatal affricate pair is the claim that affricates and palatals undergo devoicing earlier than other sibilants ([PERSON], 1993, pp. 209-10). The other central aim of the experiment is to determine whether devoicing is possible in the same position as in Early Modern Spanish, i.e., in medial intervocalic context. Thus, only this position has been taken into consideration, except for /\(\widehat{\mathrm{s}}\)/: as commented before, this consonant is very rare in this position (see note 8), so the utterances with this segment were intervocalic but in word-initial position with no speech interruption or pause between the preceding vowel and the sibilant. On the other hand, in order to avoid vowel effects on the consonant which could skew the results, the vowels surrounding the sibilants were restricted to the central ones (/a/ and /o/). Stress could also have been considered as a factor in the corpus configuration, since unstressed position has been claimed to favour lenition ([PERSON], 2001, p. 168; [PERSON] and [PERSON], 2019, p. 288). In fact, as [PERSON] (2016, p. 36) comments, lexical stress seems to play a role in voicing implementation (see also [PERSON], 1978, p. 96). However, we finally rejected stress as a factor because it was not clearly relevant in [PERSON] (1997, p. 490) and not relevant at all in a first statistical approach to our data.11  
Footnote 11: The word-initial position is not a word-initial position, but it is not a word-initial position. Language change occurs in casual speech. However, using a spontaneous speech corpus would have implied major difficulties in controlling the experimental variables. For this reason and taking into account that this is a first approach to the topic, a reading task was preferred. The selected speakers had to read aloud twice 23 short sentences (8 of them distractors), which contained words including the eight Catalan sibilants. Some examples are given in the sentences below and the whole list is offered in Appendix A. 1. [label=a.] 2. La tieta es va _casar_ amb un senyor de Capdepera. 3. ['Auntie married a man from Capdepera']
4. Li agradava moltissim anar a la _platja_ el mes de setembre. 5. ['He/She adored going to the beach in September']  
A total of 16 female speakers aged between 22 and 68 were recruited for this task. All of them had university education and none reported speech production problems. Ten of them were from Girona (Northern Catalonia), so they were Central Catalan speakers, while the other six were Majorana (thus Majorcan Catalan speakers). It was considered interesting for the purpose of the research to examine whether there were differences in the production of sibilants depending on the dialect. Neither Central Catalan in Girona nor Majorana Catalan displayed devoicing phenomena, but Majorcan Catalan tends to strengthen sibilant fricatives to affricates in medial position ([PERSON], 2016, pp. 127-28), which implies an increase in duration. Since duration is one of the relevant cues in devoicing, it will be pertinent to check whether this tendency can involve a greater degree of devoicing in Majorcan speakers. It is important to note that all speakers identified Catalan as their L1, and declared that they were dominant in this language, with no influence of Spanish pronunciation.