The vowel system of Catalan has been the focus of many studies, though work on the varieties spoken on the island of Eivissa (Ibiza) are scarce, with a single mention of the possible merger of the mid back vowels /o, ɔ/ (Torres Torres, Marià. 1983. Aspectes del vocalisme tònic eivissenc. Eivissa 14. 22–23). The present article provides the first acoustic analysis of the vowel inventory of 25 young native speakers of Eivissan Catalan, with a focus on the realisations of stressed /ə, ɛ/, and the back mid vowels /o, ɔ/. We employed Pillai scores (Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren & Katie Drager. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34. 458–484) to compare the possibly merged pairs /ə, ɛ/ and /o, ɔ/ to the fully-contrasting neighbouring pairs /e, ɛ/ and /o, u/. Our results show that all participants had considerable overlap of stressed /ə/ and /ɛ/, and all but one had considerable overlap of the back mid vowels, while the fully contrastive pairs (/e, ɛ/ and /o, u/) showed almost no overlap.

This paper presents a first attempt to formally characterize the prosodic properties of Spanish acronyms. Based on the examination of a dataset and the results of a written questionnaire and perception test administered to native speakers, the stress patterns and prosodic size of Spanish acronyms are investigated. We show that stress in acronyms follows the regular stress patterns of the language. We further claim that acronyms are restricted to an upper limit of three syllables, which we explain by resorting to layered feet. Additionally, we show that an interesting minimality requirement applies exclusively to acronyms, one that must be expressed not in terms of syllable weight, but rather in terms of the number of segments.