3.2.1 General procedures
The following tasks were conducted: an elicitation task, a sociolinguistic interview, a lexical
decision task, an AX task, and a phoneme identification task.
The study was conducted over two, or in a few cases three, sessions. Each participant
was met at a central location in the University of Seville Rectory building and accompanied
to a quiet classroom or to the Phonetics Lab. They gave informed consent, and then they
were then asked to complete a demographic questionnaire (see Appendix B). The produc-
tion portion of the interview was conducted first in order to best avoid the participants’
becoming aware of the focus of the study. This consisted of the elicitation task and then
the sociolinguistic interview, recorded on a Zoom H1 Ultra-Portable Digital Audio Recorder
using a Audio-Technica PRO70 Cardioid XLR Lavalier microphone, sampling at 44,000 Hz.
The interview was followed by the lexical decision experiment. The second session then
began with the phoneme identification task and then the AX task. These two tasks were
conducted last as, in asking speakers to listen to many instances of [s] and [T], they made it
fairly apparent what the object of the study was. Finally, the participant completed a local
identity questionnaire (Appendix B), and I conducted a debriefing conversation immediately
afterward, which was also recorded.
All portions of the study sessions were conducted by me. I am non-native speaker
of Spanish who has spent a total of 3 years in Seville. I have a near-native proficiency
in Spanish and am often taken for a native speaker. I achieved fluency in Spanish while
studying in Seville, and my Spanish shows a strong influence of the local variety, perhaps
most saliently in lenition of coda /s/. Spaniards (linguists and non-linguists) from both
Andalusia and elsewhere in Spain comment that my Spanish sounds markedly Andalusian.
I has a self-reported rate of 100%seseo, having been first taught Latin American Spanish and
then exposed to mixedseseo/distincti´on input in Seville. When conducting sociolinguistic
Z-words S-words
buceo ‘scuba’ suelo ‘floor’
zurdo ‘left-handed’ basura ‘trash’
cielo ‘sky’ son´o ‘rang’
precio ‘price’ seco ‘dry’
cintur´on ’belt’ sorda ‘deaf’
Table 3.1: The target words in the elicitation task.
on the speech of the interviewee, a phenomenon known as the Observer’s Paradox (Labov,
Yaeger, et al. 1972). A specific worry here is that a foreign interviewer may induce a
heightened pressure to employ a more standard style. However, my impression is that my
use of local dialect features generally served to reassure participants that it was OK to
speak normally.
3.2.2 Sentence completion task
The elicitation task was conducted before the sociolinguistic interview. This was done with
the intent to maximize attention paid to speech (Labov 1972:112) and thus pressure to make
the contrast. Participants generally relax over the course of a sociolinguistic interview. An
elicitation task was chosen over a reading task in order to minimize the affect of orthography,
which informs and/or reminds the speaker which sound is standard in the context.
The elicitation task was a cloze task (Taylor 1953) in which the participant had to
provide the final word of a sentence. The sentence was read aloud by the interviewer, and
repeated once if necessary. There were 29 sentences (see Appendix A for a complete list).
6 of the target items were S-words and 6 were T-words (see Table 3.2.2. Since the subjects
did not always produce the target word, the amount of S- and T-words actually produced
during the task varied.
3.2.3 Sociolinguistic interviews
The current study is primarily concerned with the amount ofseseospeakers use in everyday
paid to speech (Labov 2001). The sociolinguistic interview is the “gold standard” method
used by sociolinguists to obtain speech data (Tagliamonte 2011).
For the present study, the investigator prepared list of topics to select from during
the interview. The full list is below. Two are related to yearly events that are culturally
important in Seville. Semana Santa ‘Holy Week’ refers to the week of Easter. Seville is
home to what is probably Spain’s most well-known Easter celebration. Most of the city
has the week off from work, and processions are put on by 60hermandades ‘brotherhoods’.
Each hermandad carries three multiple-thousand-pound structures called pasos bearing an
image of the Virgin Mary or of Jesus on the cross, through the streets of the city on
the backs on men of the brotherhood. They are preceded by a string band and a long
procession. They form an impressive sight that quite literally takes over the city for the
week. Holy Week is a point of strong local pride, even for non-religious Sevillans (Mitchell
1990). Not everyone enjoys the event, but being an aficionado of Holy Week is part of a
certain Sevillan stereotype. The same stereotypical Sevillan will also be a loyal attendee
of the “April Fair”, an weeklong annual event in Seville, taking place on the outskirts of
the city. It originated as a simple trade fair, but developed over time into a celebratory
gathering of huge proportions. The city virtually empties out into the fairgrounds for the
week. It is much more of a party than solemn Holy Week; attendees eat, drink sherry, and
dance to traditional music. Women don a type of colorful ruffled dress that is only worn to
the fair, and those who are well-off enough arrive to the event in a horse-drawn carriage.
Other topics were drawn from the standard set of sociolinguistic modules from (Labov
1972). The list included:
• Childhood games
• Childhood friendships
• Childhood accidents
• Local festivals
Of these, the topics that were covered in every interview were local festivals and child-
hood games. The interviews lasted between 30 and 60 minutes.