# More on Sibilant Devoicing in Spanish Diachrony: An Initial Phonetic Approach
## 4 Discussion
Blue shades indicate statistical similarities among the categories. comparison to voiceless ones, which seem to be somewhat more stable. This may indicate that voiceless sibulants are easier to parse, which seems to be consistent with the acoustic results: as explained before, they are more homogeneous in their production ([s] and [J] were basically produced as fully devoiced sibilants) than voiced sibilants, which displayed more variability. This would lead, in the case of voiceless sibilants, to the acoustic-auditory space being more crowded around similar values, thus yielding more canonical exemplars which should be easier to identify as voiceless. This is particularly evident in [s], [J] and [\(\{\bar{\textsf{t}}\}\)]. As commented before, [6] presents a completely different tendency, but we must remember that the context may play a role in its behaviour: [PERSON] (1997) or [PERSON] (2016, p. 46) demonstrate that position in the word is an important factor in voicing. Indeed, our results are in line with [PERSON] (1997, p. 487), who found that devoicing was more likely to occur in onset word-medial position than in word-initial position. We have seen that the particular limitations to the distribution of [\(\{\bar{\textsf{s}}\}\)] has some consequences in the acoustic approach, but it seems to be even more apparent at the perception level. Its results, therefore, may not be really comparable to the other cases, more so if we take into account that words including this element in Catalan are not frequently used and/or are often loanwords. A better selection of the target items in this case could have changed the results. Voiced sibilants, on the other hand, tended to be produced as partially devoiced (only [z] was usually uttered as fully voiced, in line with [PERSON] and [PERSON] 2014, p. 117), which would mean a displacement from the expected canonical forms and a less crowded space around the prototypes. This would entail greater difficulty in the parsing process and a higher rate of confusion. This fact is evident in the case of [\(\{\bar{\textsf{d}}\}\)], where misparings are the norm rather than the exception. Another voiced segment, [3], seemed to be taking this route in Majorcan Catalan, since misperceptions are statistically significant, although not yet prevalent. Stimuli interpreted as voiced were generally shorter and had a lower proportion of unvoiced frames (except for [\(\{\bar{\textsf{d}}\bar{\textsf{s}}\}\)]). This behaviour was overwhelmingly clear in the case of fricative and denotalveolar affricate sibilants. Palatal affricate stimuli could be labelled as voiceless, even when duration decreased, though this result is related more to the tendency for [\(\{\bar{\textsf{d}}\bar{\textsf{s}}\}\)] to be parsed as voiceless than to the results for [\(\{\bar{\textsf{t}}\}\)]. From these observations some important ideas arise. As [PERSON] (1978), [PERSON] (1997), [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2001), [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2006), [PERSON] (2013, 2015) or [PERSON] (2016) argue, voicing does not seem to be a categorical feature, but a gradual one. Our results in Catalan, which generally agree with [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2014) and [PERSON] et al. (2015), give support to this idea. At least in sibilant consonants, there is variation in the acoustic realizations, which demonstrates it. In fact, sounds corresponding to voiced categories display different degrees of voicing and may include allophones which could be classified as fully devoiced following [PERSON]'s (1997, p. 478) criteria. Obviously, these examples are not the majority among these categories, but entail a certain overlap with voiceless categories. Phonetic realizations of voiceless sibilants also include partially voiced instances, although, in these cases, fully voiced exemplars are anecdotic. As mentioned above, this is consistent with duration values.