ABSTRACT
This study examines the social evaluations of two traditional Andalusian features (ceceo, [ʃ]) compared to two supra-local Castilian features (distinción, [tʃ]) in order to examine the social motivation for ongoing dialect leveling in syllable-onset position in Andalusian Spanish. A matched-guise experiment found that the guises with distinción or [tʃ] features were evaluated as being of higher socioeconomic level and more urban compared to guises with ceceo or [ʃ]. These evaluations, however, varied by speaker gender and listener education per linguistic variable. The implications are two-fold: (i) these social evaluations demonstrate the social motivation for the current phonetic and phonological changes in the formation of an intermediate Andalusian variety; (ii) the influence of speaker and listener characteristics on the perception of linguistic variables is not monolithic, but may vary per linguistic variable.
