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Nasals Unplugged: The Aerodynamics ofNasal De-occlusivization in Spanish

The specification of “canonical” nasal consonants (excluding, e.g., the phonemically breathy nasals of Tsonga and the creaky nasals of Kwakw’ala) with respect to the feature VOICE presents phonologists with a problem. Certain assimilatory behaviors of nasals suggest they may be voiced, others that they are voiceless or at least unspecified for the feature. In Japanese, for example, sonorants (including nasals) do not behave like other voiced obstruents when it comes to Lyman’s Law for Rendaku voicing (Itô et al. 1995). Nonetheless, voiceless obstruents in Japanese become voiced after nasals. The voicing of nasals and other sonorants has thus been viewed as an instance of featural underspecification (Steriade 1994). Is there a way to instrumentally verify formal claims about the featural specification of nasals? From the perspective of laboratory phonology, it is reasonable to assess the validity of any claim about the featural specification of a sound by instrumentally evaluating its behavior in a given language. One celebrated phonological behavior in Spanish is spirantization, lenition, or “deocclusivization.” This is the process by which the voiced stops /b d g/ become voiced fricatives [  ] in intervocalic position (Harris 1969, Quilis 1981, Martínez-Celdrán 1991). The same change occurs when the stop is adjacent to sonorant consonants as well (Widdison 1997). Spirantization of the voiceless stops /p t k/ only occurs if the voiceless stops first become voiced /b d g/. The results are voiced fricatives, as in Canary Island, Peninsular (Bilbao), and Central Colombian Spanish (Oftedal 1985, Lewis 2001). In short, the intervocalic output of /p t k/ in Spanish is never [  x]. The phonetic output of spirantization applied to nasal obstruents, however, is still unclear. Will nasal obstruents deocclusivize in a manner comparable to voiced stops?