The phonetic-phonological perception of the Chilean Spanish phoneme /͡tʃ/: An experimental sociophonetic study

Abstract

The present study explores, at a phonetic-phonological level, the sociolectal allophony of the Chilean Spanish phoneme /͡tʃ/. For this purpose, a perception simple pair discrimination test was designed and fifty middle-aged women from Santiago, classified into two sociocultural groups, were asked to evaluate the proximity among the allophones under study. The hypothesis was that variant distinction of different social use varies between the two groups. Quantitative analysis results, based on a multidimensional scaling test (MDS), show that high social group women present greater perceptual sensitivity than those of the low social group, especially concerning the grade of dissimilarity expressed between the affricate standard variant and the allophones with fricative prominence.