Un análisis fonolófico y contrastivo sobre palabras inventadas

Abstract

A contrast has been carried out concerning the frequencies of occurrence of the Spanish vowel phonemes as they appear in various theatre and novel extracts chosen at random, and the frequency of occurrence of these vowel phonemes in words made up by some Spanish speaking subjects. In the made-up words a lack of statistically significant differences between the frequency front vowels /i,e/, central /a/ and back /o,u/ is appreciated. This absence of differences implies that, considering the five phonemes separately, a higher frequency of occurrence of the central phoneme /a/ is distinguished. In the literary extracts there exist statistically significant differences. Front vowels appear more frequently than central and back vowels. There are no statistical differences between the last two. /a/ and /e/ -with similar frequencies- stand out for their high frequency compared with that of /i,o,u/. Once contrasted separately, the frequency of the phonemes found in the literary extracts with those of the made-up words, it is appreciated a big falling-off of /e/, in the made-up words, wich causes an increase of the rest of phonemes. As far as made-up words are concerned, it is noticed a tendency to use /a/ more often than in the literary extracts. The mental search of a certain contrast with this vowel phoneme makes the student reject /e/ due to its similarity to /a/, and increase the frequency with which the phonemes /i,o,u/ appear in the texts. The result is that in the made-up words, a tendency to centralization is observed, together with the marks produced by the students' language regarding the frequencies of the vowel phonemes /i,o,u/.