Speech samples were obtained from college student Miami-area Cuban informants in an attempt to test the hypothesis that a compensatory phonemic change takes place in certain Spanish dialects in which syllable-final and word-final /s/ appear optionally as zero. Vowel system, distinction (open versus closed), and length are looked at. (SCC)

In standard American Spanish, the velar nasal surface variant of systematic /n/ occurs only in syllable-final environments, when the immediately following segment is a velar consonant. In many American Spanish dialects, however, "ng" may also optionally appear phonetically in other phonological environments. Cuban Spanish is such a…

It has been reported (Terrell 1974) that in Cuban Spanish word-final /s/ aspiration is generally not affected by grammatical constraints, except for determiners in prevocalic environments. However, deletion of /s/, according to Terrell, is correlated with morphological classes and grammatical function, and is constrained by functional…