The Vibrants of Spanish of the Department of Puno: An Acoustic Characterization

Abstract

This paper provides a phonetic description of the different variants of the simple and multiple vibrants of Spanish in the department of Puno. For this purpose, four collaborators were interviewed and each one had an informal conversation with the interviewer in order to obtain a spontaneous sample. Likewise, the paper is based on two central ideas: 1) due to their heterogeneity, vibrants vary even in the same context, and 2) they are characterized by the number and nature of the components that make them up. The phonetic-acoustic description was based on broadband spectrographic analysis and on the oscillographic analysis of the complex wave, which allowed to report, first, single-component variants (approximant vibrants, approximant vibrants with noise and vibrants realized as occlusion); second, two-component variants (vibrants with a vowel element and an occlusive element, vibrants with a vowel element and an approximant element, vibrants with an element realized as noise and a vowel element, among others); third, three-component variant (vibrants with a vowel element plus an occlusive element plus a vowel element); finally, elisions were reported. In total, twelve different realizations of vibrants have been identified and most of these have not been reported before for the Spanish of the department of Puno.