Herrick 2003

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An Acoustic Analysis of Phonological Vowel Reduction in Six Varieties of Catalan

Dylan Herrick
UCSC PhD dissertation, 2003

This is a dissertation on phonological vowel reduction. The empirical focus of the dissertation is a quantitative acoustic study of six regional varieties of Catalan - a Romance language spoken primarily in northeastern Spain. Chapter One provides a brief historical background on Catalan as well as a description of the patterns of vowel reduction found in each of the six Catalan varieties. The remaining chapters provide more detail on the theoretical background (Chapter Two), the experimental methodology (Chapter Three), the acoustic data (Chapter Four), and a discussion of some of the theoretical implications of the data (Chapter Five).

The principal findings of this dissertation are that i) the acoustic data (largely) support the impressionistic descriptions of the six varieties studied, ii) the primary characteristic of Catalan vowel reduction is raising (not centralization) and therefore supports the phonetic explanation to vowel raising given in Crosswhite (1999, to appear), Flemming (1995, to appear), and Barnes (2002), iii) the F1 raising attested in the data matches the predicted amount of raising (and never exceeds this amount) for all six varieties, iv) vowels are not evenly spaced throughout the vowel space, and v) the attested minimal distance between neighboring vowels is always smaller than the theoretically predicted minimal distance.

email the author at dylan at human.mie-u.ac.jp

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