In the development of Latin initial F-, Spanish differs greatly from other Romance languages in which generally F- did not undergo any change.  In Spanish, Latin F- changed from /f/ (argued to be most likely bilabial) to the aspirated /h/.  This /h/ sound continued until about the end of the sixteenth century and then was eliminated, although it still continues dialectally in a few places today.  This lenition process did not take place when Latin F- preceded an /r/ or the semi-consonant [w].  However, there are a number of words, besides the "learned" words (or cultismos) in which F- did not change (feo, falcón) and there are dialectal varieties today in which F- is aspirated before [w] (New Mexican Spanish, for example).  It was the purpose of this study to investigate whether frequency effects, lexical diffusion and phonetic environment could provide a possible explanation for these words and their phonetic realizations.

Having been established that sound change in more frequently used words develops more quickly than in low frequency words, I expected that Spanish words that had retained the Latin F- would not be the most commonly used.  By conducting a study using a medieval text as my source, as well as current dialect studies, I examined to what extent this was true.  What I determined was that words with a high frequency in Spanish developed the aspirate /h/ sooner than words with low frequency, and that low frequency words developed the sound change later, if at all.  In addition, this sound change is shown to develop earlier in uniform environments, and later in alternating ones.  It is apparent, therefore, that lexical diffusion, frequency and the examination of phonetic environments can offer us an explanation for these words, that until now, have remained as inexplicable exceptions to the /f/ > /h/ > /0/ development.

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