Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation 249types. In other words, if lectal varieties form prototype categories, the cen-
tral images will consist of a unique combination of relatively shared lin-
guistic features.
It is thus quite obvious to raise the following question: would it be the
case that the farther away from the speech of Madrid (as a default reference
value for the listeners) a variety is linguistically speaking, the easier it is to
recognize the accent in question? I.e. at more phonetic distance, better iden-
tification?
Table 20. Main linguistic differences in speech fragments when contrasted with a
default variety: qualitative overview
Feature description And Gal Can Arg Mex Fra Ger BrE AmE
/r/ as uvular fricative 9 9 9 9
marked tone unit clause final 9
marked tone unit interrogative mood 9 9
/Ɵ/ as [s] 9 9 9 9 9 9
final and checked /s/ dropped 9 9
final /r/ dropped 9
intervocalic /s/ as marked aspiration 9
isolated vowel change (apatece) 9 9
final /l/ as [ł] 9 9
/r/ as back uvular 9
/y/ as [ʒ] or [ʃ] 9
/d/ as alveolar 9 9 9 9
marked tone unit exclamative mood 9
aspirated initial /t/ 9
vowel changes: close e/o, [æ] for [a] 9In Table 20 we present the perceptually most salient linguistic differences -
i.e. we consider only those contrasts that are immediately salient and audi-
ble at a fairly general level - that which characterized the speech fragments
implemented in the test with respect to the default accent. As we would
expect, most of the features are shared with other accents, but the combina-
tions as such are unique and thus socially distinctive. If we now quantify
the differences at this quite general, coarse level of description we observe
that the differences numerically speaking range between 2 and 5, as indi-
cated in Table 21. As the accents appear in order of correct identification,