Migration processes and the geography of Costa Rica have given rise to a complex dialect reality in this country. There are areas within the country that are geographically separated, but that share phonetic features (QUESADA PACHECO, 1991; 2013).

A particular set of variables of interest correspond to the alveolar trill /r/ and the alveolar tap /ɾ/. These rhotics present several allophones, some associated with different localities and phonological environments. Likewise, social processes and the influence of academic authority figures and the press have led to the stigmatization of some of these variants. This is the case of rural speech, the voiceless alveolar approximant allophone of the alveolar tap, and the voiced alveolar approximant of the alveolar trill. (QUESADA PACHECO, 2000).

In this work1 we explore, in a preliminary way, the perception of social class and educational level that may be associated with different allophones of the rhotics. For the purposes of this work, perception is understood as the impression that a listener has regarding a recording of an unknown speakers’ socioeconomic class and educational level, in the absence of additional social clues. Additionally, self-perception refers to the impression that a speaker has that their speech reflects their socioeconomic class.

The sample of speakers used in this study are all middle-class Costa Rican professionals, and inhabitants of the Central Valley, although they come from different regions of the country. Unlike in other previous studies of listener perception (CAMPBELL-KIBLER 2006; NIEDZIELSKI 1999), the listeners in our study were not provided with information regarding the social characteristics of the speakers.

We consider whether the different allophones of the alveolar tap and alveolar trill may be related to different sociocultural perceptions. In particular, our hypothesis is that the use of the voiceless alveolar approximant as an allophone of the tap and the assibilated realizations of the trill are related to listener perceptions of the speaker as belonging to a lower socioeconomic class or having lower educational level.

This work focuses on the alveolar tap /ɾ/ and trill /r/, as well as their various allophones within Costa Rican speech. This study is focused on the strings of segments that contain the alveolar tap in combination with other consonants, as is the case with the segment /tɾ/ and /dɾ/.

According to the work of Quesada Pacheco (1996) the alveolar tap has four allophones:

1. Voiced alveolar tap [ɾ]: this allophone is found across all regions of the country.

2. Voiceless alveolar approximant [ɹ̥]: this allophone has been described by Quesada Pacheco both as voiceless alveolar fricative (QUESADA PACHECO 1996) and as voiceless prepalatal fricative (QUESADA PACHECO 2000). However, the symbols used in both works suggest that the allophone corresponds to an approximant in the current IPA terminology. It is found before /s/ and in the string of segments /tɾ /. This allophone is found in the Central Valley, although it is currently receding, and it is stigmatized by the urban youth population (QUESADA PACHECO 2000).

3. Voiced alveolar approximant [ɹ]: this allophone is described as voiced alveolar fricative in (QUESADA PACHECO 1996), although the symbol used corresponds to the alveolar approximant. It is found in complementary distribution with [ɹ̥].

4. Voiced retroflex tap [ɽ]: found in the Central Valley and to a smaller extent in the Northwest, South and Atlantic regions of the country.

An additional variant of the alveolar tap described by Quesada Pacheco (1996) corresponds to the elision of /ɾ/ before enclitic pronouns (except in the case of the pronoun -te). Elision of the alveolar tap in the infinitive before enclitic pronouns is considered a stereotypical element of rural speech. Even the school system and the media fight this variant (QUESADA PACHECO, 2000).

In the case of the alveolar trill /r/, Quesada Pacheco (1996) describes the following allophones:

1. Voiced alveolar trill [r]: found in all regions of the country and more frequently in the northwest, north, Atlantic, and South Pacific regions.

2. Voiced alveolar approximant [ɹ]: this allophone is described by Quesada Pacheco (1996) as voiced alveolar tense fricative, however, the symbol used corresponds to the current voiced alveolar approximant. This is the most common allophone of /r/ in Costa Rica.

3. Voiced alveolar affricate [dɹ]: this allophone can be found after pause, nasal or lateral.

4. Voiceless alveolar approximant [ɹ̥]: found only in final position. This allophone was described by Quesada Pacheco (1996) as voiceless alveolar fricative.

5. Voiced retroflex approximant [ɻ]: found more frequently in the young population.

6. Voiced uvular trill [ʀ]: found only in the Puriscal region and stigmatized by the educational system

Other authors have studied the phonetic variation of rhotics in Costa Rican speech, particularly in San José (CALVO SHADID, 1995; CALVO SHADID; PORTILLA CHAVES, 1998; VÁSQUEZ CARRANZA 2006), and have observed more allophones than those described above. However, we consider that the work by Quesada Pacheco (1996) provides a summarized overview of the allophones of rhotics present in Costa Rican speech, as it considers speakers from different regions of the country.

A previous study by Calvo Shadid and Castillo Rivas (2014) has shown that Costa Rican speakers in the Central Valley perceive the speech variety from the Central Valley as distinct from that of the other regions in the country.

The perception of socioeconomic characteristics of a speaker based on audio samples has been found to be dependent on social information regarding the speakers (NIEDZIELSKI 1999; CAMPBELL-KIBLER, 2006). A study by Niedzielsky (1999), done on English language speakers in Canada, showed that listeners make use of social information, including stereotypes, when considering their perception of a speaker’s variety. The aforementioned study also showed that speakers can provide inaccurate assessments of their own variety. Due to the possible influence of social information on the perceptions of speakers, Niedzielsky concludes that research in speech perception and language change must take this effect into account.

The work of Campbell-Kibler (2006), although focused on the variable (ING) in English pronunciation, further showed that the perception of listeners is based on social and linguistic contexts. The social information available is connected in various ways by the different listeners and used to construct inferences about the speakers. These inferences may include aspects such as origin, region, education, and even sexual orientation of the speaker. Even a single variable, such as (ING), is linked to a complex network of social meanings. As a consequence, studies must take into consideration that social information available to listeners plays a crucial role in determining listener perception.

The population of interest in this study corresponded to a group of professionals living in the Greater Metropolitan Area (Gran Area Metropolitana, GAM) originally from both this area and from other regions of the country. The study population consisted of 12 people aged between 23 and 46 years. Eight people were women and four were men. The details of this population are found in Table 1. The sample was composed of speakers available to the researchers. All speakers are identified with the H# label, where # corresponds to a sequential identification number arbitrarily assigned to each participant.

All participants provided informed consent to participate in this study. They were volunteers and did not receive any form of payment for their participation in this work.

In the sentence reading task, all speakers performed the alveolar tap as [ɾ] in the intervocalic and final locations, as well as in the group [ɾt]. Similarly, it was realized as an alveolar tap in the context of the groups [tɾ], [dɾ] and [bɾ]. Most of the speakers, except for H1, performed the group [pɾ] as tap. In the case of H1, one of its realizations was perceived by the coder as a fricative, although the coder considered it to be very close to a tap. Despite the lack of acoustical analysis to determine fricative noise, it was decided to code this instance as a fricative to show the slight variation in this case with respect to clearer realizations of the tap.

The realizations of the alveolar tap in the pre-nasal environment showed greater variability, as shown in Table 3. The tap allophone was most common; all the speakers presented at least one case with this variant.

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Prof. Ximena del Río Urrutia and Lander Arias in this work and in the corresponding presentation at the Linguistweets 2020 conference. The authors also wish to thank the participants in this study. This work would not have been possible without their collaboration.

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