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Cross-linguistic studies have shown that while there are languages whose sound inventories have an abundant number of voiced obstruents (e.g. English), there are others that are completely deprived of them (e.g. Hawaiian). By including voiced obstruents in its inventory, the former type of language has the possibility of encoding different meanings through the use of minimal pairs that contrast in voicing. Yet there are also languages, which have voiced obstruents but only of a certain type. In Spanish for example, fricatives and affricates do not contrast in voicing. Only stops may be voiced.Interestingly, Spanish not only restricts the type of obstruent that may be voiced; it also exhibits a tendency to minimize the use of the few voiced obstruents it has by alternating them with related sounds. This paper studies the processes of spirantization and devoicing in Spanish. The analysis developed here relates these processes to the universal principles responsible for the limited number of voiced obstruents in this language. It also demonstrates that neither of these processes is an instance of feature spreading (assimilation). The actual aim in spirantizing or devoicing voiced stops is to simplify linguistic structures and gain articulatory ease. Voiced obstruents are marked at the phonological level, and effortful at the phonetic level, because they require intense muscular effort to sustain vocal fold vibration at the same time that an oral closure takes place. Although Spanish chooses to exploit voicing to create distinctive contrasts, it also resorts to strategies such as spirantization and devoicing to minimize the phonological markedness and articulatory

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