The phoneme is realized as an approximant in all contexts except after a pause, a nasal, or a lateral. In these environments, it may be realized as an affricate (). The approximant allophone differs from non-syllabic in a number of ways; it has a lower F2 amplitude, is longer, can only appear in the syllable onset (including word-initially, where non-syllabic normally never appears), is a palatal fricative in emphatic pronunciations, and is unspecified for rounding (e.g. "viuda" 'widow' vs "ayuda" 'help'). The two also overlap in distribution after and : "enyesar" ('to plaster') "aniego" ('flood'). Although there is dialectal and ideolectal variation, speakers may also exhibit other near-minimal pairs like "abyecto" ('abject') vs "abierto" ('opened'). There are some alternations between the two, prompting scholars like to postulate an archiphoneme , so that "ley" would be transcribed phonemically as and "leyes" as .