Costa Rican Spanish speakers’ phonetic discrimination

Costa Rican Spanish listeners associate intervocalic [z] with specific social attributes in a matched-guise test (Chappell, 2016) but experience difficulty when explicitly asked to produce or even comment on the variant. Given this perceptionproduction discrepancy, the present study seeks to determine how successfully listeners discriminate between allophonic differences like intervocalic [s] and [z] compared to other allophone pairs, phonemic contrasts, and identical stimuli. 106 Costa Rican listeners completed similarity rating and AX discrimination tasks in which they evaluated word pairs that were identical or differed only in one phoneme or allophone. Statistical analyses fitted to 2,862 tokens in the similarity rating task and 3,604 tokens from the AX discrimination task indicate that listeners perceive phonemic contrasts more successfully than allophonic differences, which, in turn, are perceived as more distinct than identity pairs. Interestingly, the [s] ~ [z] distinction is less successfully perceived than other allophone pairs including [n] ~ [ŋ] and [d] ~ [ð]. I contend that allophonic differences that encode linguistic information, e.g. the variable’s position within the word, or are less expected given their low frequency are heard more successfully than [s] ~ [z]. However, even the least salient phonetic variants like [s] ~ [z] can encode local social meaning and contribute to listeners’ evaluations of speakers’ social qualities.