ABSTRACT
The present chapter investigates the production and attitudes towards coda /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish. Sixteen participants, aged 18–27, completed a picture-identification task (Schmidt & Willis, 2011) and an open-ended attitudinal questionnaire. We performed acoustic analysis to identify the coda /s/ variants produced in the picture-identification task. Additionally, we analyzed the social information and attributes that participants explicitly indexed to coda /s/variants in the attitudinal questionnaire. Results showed that participants produced a wide range of /s/ variants in the production task. From these, [s] was the most frequent variant, followed by [h], [ɦ], and [ʱ]. In contrast to other studies (e.g., Galarza & Sedó, 2016), we did not find any elided tokens because, in cases of apparent /s/ elision, acoustic evidence showed a trace of voiced aspiration on the preceding vowel. Moreover, participants in our study did not explicitly attribute negative connotations to aspirated and elided variants but associated both [s] and ∅ to Dominicanness. Finally, participants did not associate /s/ variants to perceived sexual orientation, as it was suggested in other studies (e.g., Mack, 2010). This chapter contributes to the body of research on the relationship between phonetic variants and their indexed social information in contexts of language variation.
