La percepción de acentos tonales en enunciados afirmativos
Keywords:
intonation, pitch accents, perception, SpanishAbstract
While much acoustic-phonetic evidence has accumulated which proves the existence of two phonetically distinct peak alignments (L+H* and L*+H) in Spanish declaratives, whether or not the two alignments are phonologically distinct remains a topic of debate. The goal of the present paper is to utilize perceptual data, as opposed production data, to establish whether listeners can distinguish between the two pitch accents.
Participants took part in a perceptual task in which they were asked to discriminate between the peak alignments. The results indicate that participants had a bias to respond “same” to the majority of the experimental trials, which may explain why performance on “different” trials was poor. Sensitivity (A’) scores, however, indicate that overall, participants could discriminate some differences in the signal. The findings suggest that listeners could not successfully discriminate between the different pitch accent alignments. However, more evidence is needed to rule out the two pitch accent analysis.
References
BECKMAN, M.; M. DÍAZ-CAMPOS; J. MCGORY y T. MORGAN, T. (2002): «Intonation across Spanish in the Tones and Break Indices framework», Probus, 14, 1, pp. 9-36.
BEST, C.; G. MCROBERTS y E. GOODELL (2001): «Discrimination of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimiliation to the listener’s native phonological system», Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109, 2, pp. 775-794.
BOERSMA, P. y D. WEENINK (2005): PRAAT software.
DÍAZ-CAMPOS, M. y J. MCGORY (2002): «La entonación en el español de América: Un estudio acerca de ocho dialectos hispanoamericanos», Boletín de lingüística, 18, pp. 3-26.
FACE, T. (2000): «Prosodic manifestation of focus in Spanish», Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 19, 1, pp. 45-62.
FACE, T. (2001): «Focus and early peak alignment in Spanish intonation», Probus, 13, pp. 223-246.
FACE, T. (2002): «Local intonational marking of Spanish contrastive focus», Probus, 14, 1, pp. 71-92.
FACE, T y P. PRIETO, P. (2007): «Rising accents in Castilian Spanish: A revision of Sp-ToBI», Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 6, 1, pp. 117-146.
GRIER, J. B. (1971): «Nonparametric indexes for sensitivity and bias: computing formulas», Phsychological Bulletin, 75, 6, pp. 424-429.
GUSSENHOVEN, C. (2004): The phonology of tone and intonation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
HUALDE, J. I. (2000): «Intonation in Spanish and the other Ibero-Romance languages: Overview and status quaestionis», en J. Camps & C. R. Wiltshire (eds): Romance Phonology and Variation: Selected Papers from the 30th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Gainesville, febrero de 2000, Amsterdam, John Benjamins.
MCGORY, J. y M. DÍAZ-CAMPOS (2002): «Declarative Intonation Patterns in Multiple Varieties of Spanish» en J. F. Lee, K. L. Geeslin, y J. C. Clements (eds): Structure, Meaning, and Acquisition in Spanish: Papers from the 4th Hispanic Linguistic Symposium, Bloomington, 17-19 de noviembre de 2000, Sommerville, Cascadilla.
NIBERT, H. (2000): «Phonetic and phonological evidence for intermediate phrasing in Spanish intonation», tesis doctoral, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
PRIETO, P.; J. VAN SANTEN y J. HIRSCHBERGH (1995): «Tonal alignment patterns in Spanish», Journal of Phonetics, 23, pp. 429-451.
PRIETO, P.; C. SHIH, y H. NIBERT (1996): «Pitch downtrend in Spanish», Journal of Phonetics, 24, pp. 445-473.
SOSA, J. (1999): La entonación del español: Su estructura fónica, variabilidad y dialectología, Madrid, Cátedra.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
All articles published online by Estudios de Fonética Experimental are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED), unless otherwise noted. Estudios de Fonética Experimental is an open access journal. Estudios de Fonética Experimental is hosted by RCUB (Revistes Científiques de la Universitat de Barcelona), powered by Open Journal Systems (OJS) software. The copyright is not transferred to the journal: authors hold the copyright and publishing rights without restrictions. The author is free to use and distribute pre and post-prints versions of his/her article. However, preprint versions are regarded as a work-in-progress version used as internal communication with the authors, and we prefer to share postprint versions.
