The role of perceptual salience in a strengthening sound change

The current study examines the extent to which perceptual factors may account for the emergence of assibilated variants of the alveopalatal approximant /j/ in two geographically remote varieties of Spanish. Participants from Medellin, Colombia and Santiago, Dominican Republic completed a discrimination task and a matched guise. Both tasks presented listeners with stimuli containing affricate [ʤ] and approximant [j] allophones of /j/. Participants were more accurate when discriminating between sound pairs that included the affricate allophone, suggesting that the presence of (af)frication is a salient acoustic cue upon which judgments are reliably made. Therefore, we argue that the emergence of assibilated variants ([ʤ], [ʒ]) can be explained in part by more prominent acoustic cuing and thus greater perceptual salience. Evidence of the relationship between these findings and a possible sound change in progress is observed in the association of social characteristics with [ʤ] and [j].