Lenition of /d/ in spontaneous Spanish and Catalan

摘要

The present study explores the acoustics of /d/ in two corpora of Spanish and Catalan spontaneous speech. Three acoustic metrics were developed as indexes of articulatory weakening. The findings suggest that variations in the implementation of /d/ result from gradient modulations in constriction degree on a unimodal statistical-acoustic distribution. The preceding segment is a strong predictor of the weakening of Catalan and Spanish /d/.