Propuesta de transcripción para la africada palatal sonora del español

The Spanish voiced palatal afrricate is a controversial segment, as authors disagree as to its nature. This paper aims to analyze its acoustic and articulatory phonetic characteristics and compare them with the acoustic phonetic characteristics off the palatal voiced affricates in Hungarian, as well as prepalatals in Catalan, so as to establish its defining phonetic features. Taking the resulting data as starting point, a new formulation of its definition and a transcription that is more in accordance with the data is proposed: it is, then, a double articulation with a fully palatal place of articulation whose second element is an approximant; thus, its suitable transcription is [ℓ∂].