Investigating a gradual metathesis: Phonetic and lexical factors on /s/- aspiration in Andalusian Spanish

Investigating a gradual metathesis: Phonetic and lexical factors on /s/-aspiration in Andalusian Spanish Metathesis has often been described as abrupt and sporadic and thus as an exception to neogrammarian sound change (e.g. Wang 1969), while others suggested metatheses to be gradual, phonetically based developments (e.g. Blevins & Garrett 1998). Andalusian Spanish provides an opportunity to study this issue. As in many other Spanish varieties, in Andalusian Spanish, syllable final /s / is usually weakened to [h] or even deleted (pasta ‘paste/pasta ’ [ˈpahta]). Traditional dialectological or sociolinguistic studies used to transcribe medial /sp, st, sk / as pre-aspirated stops [hp, ht, hk] or geminates [pp, tt, kk]. However, post-aspirated stops [ph, th, kh] have recently been reported for Western Andalusian Spanish (Torreira 2007a, 2012; Parrell 2012). Ruch & Harrington (submitted) found that younger Andalusian speakers produced /st / with an important amount of post-aspiration, while older speakers produced a longer pre-aspiration. In this study 11 Spanish words with medial /st / followed by different vowels (e.g. pestiño, pestaña, estufa) are analysed in order to investigate whether the emergence of post-aspiration is favored by phonetic factors and/ or by lexical frequency. By a semi-automatic procedure voice offset time (VOff T) was measured for pre