We offer an acoustic study of variation in the realization of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Catalan and Spanish. We consider the effects of phonological inventory (Catalan has a distinction between /s/ and /z/ that Spanish lacks) and position in word (i.e. effects of word boundaries). An analysis of a corpus of Map Task interviews in Catalan and Spanish revealed that Spanish word-medial and initial intervocalic /s/ segments are shorter than in Catalan. Whereas our results are consistent with the predictions of theories incorporating functional principles (i.e. contrast preservation), we also consider other possible explanations of the facts. The analysis also revealed that Spanish word-final intervocalic /s/ segments are weaker along the two dimensions that we examined (duration and voicing) than their initial and medial counterparts. We suggest that this apparently morphological effect on lenition has an articulatory explanation in terms of gestural coordination.

Collaboration between the two authors was facilitated by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education that allowed the first author to spend part of a sabbatical semester in Barcelona (Beca de movilidad SAB2010-0141). Prieto’s research has been supported by Spain’s Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (research grants FFI2009-07648/FILO and BFU2012-31995), as well as by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2009SGR-701).