Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Usage-Based Simulation Of Spanish S-Weakening, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The pronunciation of Spanish /s/ as an aspirate [h] (or its deletion) is studied in a usagebased simulation that assumes that prior linguistic experiences are stored as memory traces, and that these stored experiences, instead of generalizations abstracted from them, are the source of the knowledge speakers have of their language. This exploratory simulation was carried out using the algorithm of Analogical Modeling of Language (Skousen 1989, 1992).