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A Sociophonetic Analysis Of Islander Creole Rhotics, Falcon Restrepo-Ramos

World Languages & Cultures Department Publications

This study uses a combination of phonetic predictors and sociolinguistic factors to examine the variable production of rhotics in an English-based Creole in the Island of Old Providence, Colombia. Speech data were collected from five informants by means of sociolinguistic interviews and other-speech elicitation tasks, while 328 Praat-annotated tokens were extracted from a transcribed corpus of approximately 5,700 words. Rhotic production was examined according to several acoustic correlates (i.e., formant frequencies and segmental duration) and linguistic (i.e., word position and stress) and social (i.e., sex) factors. Formant frequencies in the form of F3 and F2 revealed a post-alveolar production, while …