ABSTRACT
This chapter has two overarching goals. First, we seek to provide a broad overview of the sociophonetic research related to fricatives across various languages, discussing the most prominent methods, theories, research questions, and findings to have emerged. Second, we offer a novel comparative analysis of intervocalic /s/ voicing across three varieties of Spanish: Barcelona, Spain; Loja, Ecuador; and San José, Costa Rica. Although certain linguistic factors related to articulatory phenomena condition intervocalic /s/ voicing similarly across the varieties, the effect of gender is markedly distinct, with women as the predominant voicers in Barcelona and men leading voicing in Loja and San José. After considering phonetic and physiological explanations to account for the behavior of intervocalic /s/, we propose that the social meanings indexically associated with [z] in each dialect best account for divergent gender patterns, varying as a result of the social context in which each variant resides.
