BIO

Sergio Salazar Rodó is a senior studying Linguistics and Anthropology at Florida State University. Originally from San José, Costa Rica, he and his family moved to Miami over 15 years ago. As a result, linguistic diversity has been a daily fact of his life ever since. He fell in love with linguistics a decade ago through his hobby in language construction, beginning a long-lasting personal interest in the subject that has culminated in his goal to become a linguistics professor and pursue research like The Acoustic Properties of Rhotics in Costa Rican Spanish full time. Next year, he plans to continue his studies with an M.A. in Linguistics, continuing work in phonetics/phonology and hoping to branch out into language documentation and revitalization. In addition to his work in linguistics, Sergio works tutoring language and serves as an Honors Colloquium Leader, mentoring first-year students and helping them acclimate to Florida State University.

Properties of Rhotic Variants in Costa Rican Spanish

Abstract

Variation in the pronunciation of rhotic (‘r’-like) consonants in Spanish encompasses a wide range of possibilities, from typical trills and taps to less- common realizations such as fricatives, affricates, and approximants. Rhotic variation is widespread in the central-valley region of Costa Rica. Nonetheless, there is disagreement in the literature as to the nature of this variation. Previous studies report either approximants or assibilated fricatives as the main variants with limited acoustic evidence for these conclusions. This investigation contributes to the topic by assessing the rhotic distribution of this dialect with acoustic methods. The methodology involved the audio-recoding of the speech production of native speakers of Costa Rican Spanish performing a reading task. This task involved rhotic tokens distributed in multiple contexts. Rhotic production was analyzed via the phonetics-software Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2021) to determine , voicing, duration, specific realization (tap, trill, approximant, fricative), and frequency locus (for fricatives/approximants). Results demonstrate a distribution including attested tap and trill rhotics as well as both approximant and assibilated fricative rhotics. This in combination with the acoustic findings suggest a complex distribution and underscore the need for further study into this variation.

Keywords: linguistics rhotics Costa Rica Spanish