Percepción del Contraste Bilabial-Labiodental en Las Consonantes Aproximantes del Castellano de Chile [Perception of the bilabial-labiodental contrast in the approximant consonants of the Chilean Spanish]

Perception of the bilabial-labiodental contrast in the approximant consonants of the Chilean Spanish.– Until recently, the consensus was that labiodental realizations of Spanish /b/ did not exist, and that consequently this variation in place of articulation could be safely disregarded. However, new evidence emerged showing that labiodental variants of /b/ do exist in relatively high numbers, at least in some dialects such as in Chilean Spanish. This study set out to determine whether Chilean Spanish listeners are able to perceive the differ-ences between bilabial and labiodental approximant variants of Spanish /b/ (i.e., [β̞] versus [ʋ]). In order to test this, natural and synthetic stimuli were presented to 31 native listeners in identification and discrimination tasks. Results showed that, while the identification task with natural stimuli provided mixed evidence of sensitivity to the con-trast, the identification and discrimination tasks with synthetic stimuli provided no evidence of listeners perceiving the phonetic contrast categorically. In sum, listeners do no seem able to perceive the acoustic differences between the two segments, and thus it is unlikely that this phonetic contrast could be employed to encode sociolinguistic information