Counting Closures in Spanish Trills: A Multi-Corpus Acoustic Study
The Spanish trill /r/ is canonically described as a short sequence of lingual closures, yet large-scale acoustic evidence across corpora is scarce, and automatic counters locating envelope peaks tend to conflate each closure with its release. We present a closure-based detector that locates closures gated by a quality filter and cross-checked against an independent autocorrelation-based period estimator. Applied to 3,560 well-formed (voiced, periodic) trill tokens from 356 speakers across six Spanish corpora, the detector yields a median of two closures and an inter-closure period near 36ms, matching the descriptive literature on all corpora. At the speaker level, phonotactic context is the only factor with a robust, medium effect: onset trills (word-initial and post-/n,l,s/) show more closures than intervocalic rr. We find no robust evidence of a sex effect once closures are counted directly. We report reference values and release a reproducible measurement pipeline for Spanish trills.