ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the corpus studies on phonetics and phonology currently available in Spanish; since phonetics and phonology take into account the production and reception of speech, the collection of sound material is mandatory at 124some point; the sound recorded must be transcribed and then it becomes manipulable and searchable: it turns into a corpus. The study of phonetics and phonology considers different units, be they segmental (phonemes, phones) or suprasegmental (e.g., intonation, duration, speech rate), and the transcription of the sound material is often enriched with acoustic measurements and/or symbolic annotations reflecting the different interests of study. Data can be recorded in isolated environments, with a perfect acoustic, commonly called laboratory data, or they can include spontaneous speech (e.g., interviews, debates, conversations). Phonic studies also cover multiple specific areas, like clinical linguistics, speech technologies, forensic phonetics or Spanish as a foreign language, among many others. Considering the important amount of literature on this topic, the references presented in this chapter have been selected according to two main criteria: their recent publication and their importance in terms of number of citations. Generally speaking, the study of phonic data is deeply interrelated with the evolution of hardware (quality of microphones, new recording formats, improved devices (mobile, recorders) and the evolution of software, being their collection and analysis more and more sophisticated with time, as well as the way the data are quantified by applying multiple statistical tests. In conclusion, the main concern of this chapter is to outline how a methodology based in corpus could be useful to develop phonic studies.
