Los invariantes acústicos y el punto de articulación de las oclusivas en español: una revisión de Lahiri, Gewirth y Blumstein (1984)

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to study whether the acoustic invariant proposed by Lahiri, Gewirth, and Blumstein (1984) for determining the place of articulation in stop consonants may be extended to Spanish. If so, the hypothesis claiming for the existence of (universal) acoustic invariants would receive an empirical support. In order to do so, the experiment of Lahiri, Gewirth, and Blumstein (1984) has been reproduced, as exactly as possible, with data from Spanish. Unfortunately, the proposal did not receive confirmation: the correct classification rate was 56% for all the stimuli (which contrasts with the 91.5% of the original study). Only [p] showed an acceptable correct classification rate (84%).