Syllable-Final /s/ Lenition

<h3>Introduction</h3> <p>This publication represents a study of lenition of syllable-final // in Latin American Spanish produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). The data used in this study came from three other LDC corpora, the <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC96S35" rel="nofollow">CALLHOME Spanish Speech</a> corpus, the <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC96T17" rel="nofollow">CALLHOME Spanish Transcripts</a>, and the <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC96L16" rel="nofollow">CALLHOME Spanish Lexicon</a>. It is a well-known fact that syllable-final /s/ is subject to lenition in many Latin American Spanish dialects. Lenition of -/s/ is a variable phonological process in which an -/s /may be aspirated (pronounced [h]) or deleted altogether. Lenition of -/s/ has been widely studied by sociolinguists, who have identified various linguistic and extralinguistic factors that favor the process. Since syllable-final /s /is frequent in Spanish, lenition has a great effect on overall pronunciation.</p> <h3>Data</h3> <p>Please see <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2001T60.tbl" rel="nofollow">file.tbl</a> for the directory structure of this publication, as well as a complete list of files. The primary data file consists of data stored in the following fields:</p> <ul> <li>Token id</li> <li>Code</li> <li>Confidence level</li> <li>Speaker id</li> <li>Header of the line in the transcript</li> <li>Words from the transcript</li> <li>Location of word in the speakers turn</li> <li>Location of /s/ in the word</li> <li>Preceding segment</li> <li>Following segment</li> <li>Word stress pattern</li> <li>Following word stress pattern</li> <li>Word start time</li> <li>Word end time</li> <li>Length of pause following word</li> <li>Coder</li> <li>Speakers dialect</li> <li>Speakers sex</li> <li>Speakers age</li> <li>Corrected following word</li> <li>Comment</li> <li>Morphological information</li> </ul><p>There are on the order of 3,000 - 4,000 missing occurences of syllable-final /s/ encodings. These omissions occur for two main reasons: changes in the transcriptions after the list of all of the syllable-final /s/ were generated, and the failure of some transcript lines to be automatically aligned. </p><p>For a more detailed description of this publication see the researchers description in <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2001T60.htm" rel="nofollow">HTML </a>or <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2001T60.doc" rel="nofollow">Microsoft Word </a>format. </p> </br>
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