Dialectology meets Sociophonetics: The social evaluation of ceceo and distinción in Lepe, Spain

This article analyzes the social perceptions of ceceo and distinción in the town of<br>Lepe, Spain using a matched-guise experiment created by digitally manipulating<br>spontaneous speech from twelve speakers, varying only in realizations of syllable<br>initial coronal fricatives. Based on an analysis of 92 listeners’ evaluations, the<br>speaker guises with distinción are rated as higher status, more educated, more<br>urban, and more formal and are assigned more occupational prestige than<br>those with ceceo. Additionally, listeners with more years lived away from Lepe<br>perceived these differences more so than those with little to no years lived away<br>from Lepe. The implications are three-fold: (i) listeners in Lepe evaluate the<br>national standard feature of distinción as more prestigious than the traditional<br>dialect feature of ceceo; (ii) it can be suggested that time away from Lepe impacts<br>listeners’ social evaluations of ceceo and distinción; and, (iii) even smaller<br>