Abstract

The goal of this study was to describe the phoneme frequency of the most frequent words in Chilean Spanish, as well as their syllabic characteristics. To accomplish this, a sample was selected from the dictionary of word frequency by Sadowski and Mart & iacute;nez. It consisted of 1842 words out of a total of 476,776 lemmas, calculated with a confidence level of 99% and an error margin of 3%. Each word was manually analyzed in relation to its component phonemes. Once the relative percentage of occurrence of each individual phoneme was calculated, the syllabic structure of the words was analyzed, in relation to the number of syllables and syllabic structure. Once the first author had completed phonological counts and analyses, the other two authors analyzed 20% of the randomly selected words (n = 370) to determine the reliability of phonemic counting and syllabic structure. A reliability of more than 95% was obtained. Among the results, a frequency of appearance of the different phonemes that make up Chilean Spanish was found to be different from that of previous studies, with simple percussive /f/ as the most frequent. The structure of the most frequent words is described, measured in number of syllables, frequency of appearance of complex syllables (vowel groups, consonants, syllabic coda). It is concluded that this description may be useful for the selection of stimuli for the assessment and approach of people with phonetic and phonological difficulties.