Vowel nasalization in Cuban Spanish. Formalization and instrumental analysis of speech samples from Havana

Abstract

Abstract: This article offers a study of vowel nasalization in Cuban Spanish. The research provides acoustic evidence of nasalized vowels in Cuban Spanish, particularly the Spanish of Havana. Generally, vowel nasalization is a phonetic process conditioned by the propagation of the feature [+nasal] and its association with vowels located to the right or left of a nasal consonant N. Our proposal is that vowel nasalization triggers a harmonic process with implications in the nasal feature status as well as the local or distant propagation of nasality in the Cuban Spanish Variety. The amplitude measurements carried out by the nasometer allowed us to identify two phonic patterns of nasality and two phonic patterns of nasalization. The analyzed samples were selected from a corpus of spontaneous and controlled speech that was obtained from university speakers from Havana.