Voice-onset times for Castilian Spanish initial stops

Abstract A previous experiment on the Castilian Spanish perceptual voice-onset time (VOT) boundary indicated possible differences between Spanish dialects. We therefore measured VOTs for the six Castilian stops in initial position. Significant main effects of voicing and place on VOT reproduced previous findings on Latin American Spanish dialects. Voicing also interacted with place and postconsonantal vowel. Voice-onset times for stops in the same voicing category but not in different categories correlated across speakers. Some previously published Latin American VOTs differ significantly from our measurements, and the majority of the Latin American VOTs fall outside the 99% confidence limits of our means. Spanish articulatory VOT values seem to vary with dialect, possibly influencing Spanish VOT perceptual boundaries.

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