Gestural Alignment Constraints and Unstressed Vowel Devoicing in Andean Spanish

This paper applies the gestural alignment constraint schema proposed by Gafos (2002) to unstressed vowel devoicing in Andean Spanish. I will argue that this approach successfully addresses several characteristics identified in novel data from Cusco, Peru that depart from cross-linguistic trends in vowel devoicing and cannot be readily explained in terms of more traditional Articulatory Phonology phasing terminology. The discussion is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a description of vowel devoicing patterns in Andean Spanish and compares them with the characteristics of vowel devoicing in other languages. Section 3 develops an account of the Andean data in terms of timing patterns expressed as inter-segmental and intra-segmental gestural alignment constraints while Section 4 concludes and summarizes.