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Spirant approximants in Galician

The category of approximant sounds has been defined and redefined by leading phoneticians and recognized by the International Phonetic Association; nonetheless, within this class of sounds, semivowels, rhotic sonorants and other approximants such as [ ] are not clearly differentiated. In a recently-published study, Martínez-Celdrán (2004) proposes a new definition which considers approximants as a category composed of several subclasses of sounds. In this paper, an acoustic analysis of the approximants [ ] in Galician is presented. We will show that open and closed approximants, stops and fricatives present statistically significant differences both in duration and intensity, demonstrating the pertinence of the categorization postulated by Martínez-Celdrán.