To decipher for the first time what, if any, social meaning is indexed by nonstandard intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rica, such as [paza] forpasa‘raisin’, the present study digitally manipulates 12 utterances from six Costa Rican speakers to vary only in intervocalic [s] versus [z]. Based on 106 listeners’ responses to these stimuli, I find that intervocalic [z] indexes a lower social status for all speakers but also yields higher ratings of confidence, niceness, localness, and masculinity for male speakers. Given female speakers’ limited ability to evoke positive social meanings associated with [z], I argue that accessibility to the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) conditions men's and women's differential treatment of variation. Offering a satisfying explanation for the gender paradox (Labov, 2001:261–293), this work concludes that women agentively eschew nonstandard variants that result in no positive social gains but lead linguistic innovation when their access to the indexical field is unobstructed.

Learners must develop the ability to perceive linguistic and social meaning in their second language (L2) to interact effectively, but relatively little is known about how learners link social meaning to a single phonetic variable. Using a matched-guise test targeting coda /s/ (realized as [s] or debuccalized [h]), we explore whether L2 Spanish learners identify native speakers’ social characteristics based on phonetic variants. Our results indicate that advanced learners were more sensitive to sociophonetic information; advanced listeners who had completed a phonetics course were significantly more likely to categorize /s/ reducers as Caribbean and those who had studied abroad in aspirating regions recognized a relationship between coda /s/ and status. To account for the complex interplay among proficiency, explicit instruction, and dialectal exposure in the development of L2 sociophonetic perception, we suggest the union of the L2 Linguistic Perception Model with exemplar models of phonological representation and indexical meaning.

Mexican Spanish is generally recognized as a conservative variety that maintains syllablefinal /s/, while Puerto Rican Spanish consistently weakens it. To explore what social properties are indexed by coda /s/ variants and whether these variants alone can alter evaluations of speaker origin, 75 Mexican listeners participated in a matched-guise test. They listened to recordings of five Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish speakers spliced to include only coda [s] or coda [h], evaluating speakers on a scale of social properties and identifying their perceived place of origin. Mixed effects models fitted to 6,750 evaluations demonstrate that [s] is associated with various measures of status, including intelligence, work ethic, confidence, and snobbishness. However, these evaluations are conditioned by listeners' stereotypes and regional expectations, as Mexicans were evaluated as speaking better Spanish when presented with [s] and Puerto Ricans as speaking better Spanish with [h]. Finally, listeners evaluated Puerto Rican voices as significantly more Mexican given coda [s] and Mexican voices as significantly more Caribbean given coda [h], with the most drastic shift for Mexican speakers. The paper concludes that manipulating a single salient variable (/s/) is sufficient to override other linguistic features, which play a much more limited role in social identification and evaluation.

In several dialects of Spanish, men tend to exhibit more intervocalic /s/ voicing than women, e. g., oso ‘bear’ as [ozo], and this difference may have a physiological basis. File-Muriel et al. (2015, Disentangling the physiological from the socially-learned in gradient, sociophonetic processes: Evidence from s-realization in Barranquilla, Colombia. Unpublished manuscript) found that vocal tract size conditions /s/ aspiration in Barranquilla, and Nadeu and Hualde (2013, Reinterpretation of biomechanics as gender-conditioned variation in the origin of diachronic intervocalic voicing. Available at http://washo.uchicago.edu/pub/workshop/nadeu.pdf) contend that speakers with larger vocal tracts may have greater difficulty controlling vocal fold cessation. The present work serves as a continuation of these studies, utilizing 18 sociolinguistic interviews to determine (i) what factors are most predictive of intervocalic [z] in Costa Rica and (ii) whether physiology can potentially explain its origin. The results of a statistical analysis using 1,647 tokens of /s/ show that both gender and physiological factors significantly condition voicing (p < 0.001), with more voicing in men’s speech, as F2 decreases, and as f0 decreases. However, one would expect more gradient voicing in men’s speech if physiological factors caused the gender-based voicing difference, but women voice more gradiently while men produce higher rates of 0 % and 100 % voicing. We conclude that while physiological factors may have been its original source, non-physiological factors currently condition /s/-voicing in Costa Rica, with male speakers aiming for categorical targets for social motivations.

This study uses a prominent phonetic variable in U.S. Spanish (orthographic as bilabial or labiodental) to investigate heritage Spanish speakers’ social perceptions. Based on the results of a matched-guise test in which 75 U.S.-born heritage speakers evaluated voices with a labiodental and bilabial guise, heritage speakers perceive [v] positively in the voices of women as a marker of status, confident Hispanic identities, and older age, but negatively in the voices of men. The results show that heritage speakers use phonetic variants to discern social information about others, and their judgments largely align with monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers. I conclude that heritage speakers’ sociophonetic perception in their home language attests to a rich inner world often overlooked by prescriptive forces.

The present study explores how two symbolic boundaries—linguistic variety and race—intersect, influencing how Latin American immigrants are perceived in Spain. To this end, 217 Spaniards participated in an experiment in which they evaluated three men along a series of social properties, but they were presented with different combinations of linguistic variety (Argentinian, Colombian, or Spanish) and race (a White or Mestizo photograph). The results of mixed-effects regression models found that linguistic variety conditioned participants’ evaluations of status, occupational prestige, solidarity, and trustworthiness, and both variety and race conditioned evaluations of religiousness. We contend that linguistic features become associated with a specific group of people through rhematization (Gal, 2005; Irvine & Gal, 2000) and, by extension, ideologies link those people with stereotypical characteristics. We conclude that the “ideological twinning” (Rosa & Flores, 2017) of race and linguistic variety can enhance stereotypes toward immigrants and impact their experiences in the receiving country.