The vast majority of phonetic research on Spanish segments has examined either read speech or speech elicited under carefully controlled conditions for the purpose of linguistic analysis. While such control is often necessary, one must be cautious in assuming that the results of analyzing such data are representative of speaker behavior more broadly. By examining naturally occurring speech, this book provides an overview of the range of speech productions of the various sounds of Castilian Spanish that occur in spontaneous speech. The expectation that a wider range of speech productions would be found in spontaneous speech than has been claimed previously is borne out throughout the chapters of this book. While some groups of sounds (e.g., nasals and liquids) showed little (though some) variation from what has been claimed in previous work, many showed a considerably wider range of realizations. For example, vowels showed more variability and overlap between categories than previously noted and many of the obstruent productions included articulations that have not previously been documented. While no study of spontaneous speech can include all speech styles and contexts, this book furthers our knowledge of Castilian Spanish segments by documenting a wider variety of productions than has been observed in previous studies.weiterlesen