Re-Conceptualizing Affricate Variation in Caracas Spanish

This sociophonetic study examines affricate variation through a continuous lens using dia-chronic data from Caracas Spanish. We investigate the relationship between frication and occlusion period duration in affricate segments across two steps. First, we present a phonetic characterization of the dependent variable and its variants. Second, we examine the sociolinguistic profile of the vari-ants in an oral corpus of Caracas Spanish. Correlation analyses between the frication period, occlu-sion period, and overall segment duration suggest that frication lengthening is most prominent, which may mean that affricate variation in Caracas is not necessarily a lenition process, but rather a lengthening one. Through a mixed-effects linear regression model, we determine that frication dura-tion is significantly conditioned by social and linguistic factors in Caracas. Longer frication periods are predicted by following high vowels, corpus year, speaker sex, and in word-initial position. These results suggest that traditional affricate lenition may in some cases point to a process of lengthening and retiming that is both socially and linguistically stratified. This paper contributes to the field by providing an acoustic examination of variable affricate production as well as a diachronic sociolin-guistic investigation of this phenomenon in the Spanish of Caracas, Venezuela.