Cubans' production of /s/ in consonant clusters in Norwegian

Cubans' production of /s/ in consonant clusters in Norwegian In Cuban Spanish, /s/ is produced in several ways. In a summary of findings Lipski (1994) reports that "syllable- and word-final /s/ weakens to an aspiration [h], while prepausally complete elision is more common". Examples of this will be los [loh]; tres [tre]; escuela [ek'wela]. As this seems to be a well documented feature of Cuban Spanish, we wanted to see if this feature is carried over to Norwegian spoken by Cuban immigrants. Norwegian allows quite complex consonant clusters both in syllable initial and syllable final position. In initial position /s/ is found initially in CC and CCC clusters in addition to single occurences. In coda position /s/ may be found in any position in CC and CCC clusters in addition to single occurences. It is also found as an obligatory part of CCCC clusters. Preliminary observations of Cubans' Norwegian indicate three possible ways of handling the differences between Cuban Spanish and Norwegian: 1) Pronunciation according to Norwegian pronunciation rules (i.e. [s]) 2) Pronunciation according to Cuban Spanish pronunciation rules (i.e. [h] or elision of /s/) 3) Compensatory strategies, i.e. /s/ is replaced by a postalveolar fricative (which belongs to a separate phoneme in Norwegian, but is not found in Spanish) The recordings made for this study consist of both elicitated and free speech. The /s/ productions in these speech samples will be categorized acoustically. The different categories of /s/-pronunciations will subsequently be described by means of their phonotactic properties. Litterature: Lipski, J. M. (1994). Latin American Spanish . London : Longman Paz Pérez, Carlos. (1988). De lo popular y lo vulgar en el habla cubana. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Rivas, Anthony T. (2000). Enigmas of Cuban Spanish. Proteus Vol. IX, no. 3. http://www.najit.org/proteus/v9n3/rivas_v9n3.html