Aproximación a la prosodia del habla de Madrid

Abstract

AMPER-Madrid is a research project that studies the main prosodic features of the geo-linguistic variety of Madrid Spanish focusing on its intonation structure and on the parameters of duration and intensity. The project aims at contributing to the multimedia map which intends to analyze and gather the main prosodic differences of the European Romance languages. The present study establishes a phonetic and phonological taxonomy of the characteristics prosodic features of Madrid speech. At this initial stage of the project we have focused on declarative and interrogative utterances without expansion which includes three different kinds of accents. Results are obtained following the rigorous and automatic methodology proposed by AMPER. The utterances have been digitized with Goldwave and the acoustic data have been analyzed with Matlab. The tonal structure has been annotated following the theoretical principles of the Autosegmental Metrical Theory (Pierrehumbert 1980; 1990; 2000; Ladd 1996; Hualde, 2003). In addition, following the findings of earlier studies, we have determined a tonal change at a 1.5 semitone psycholinguistic threshold (cf. Rietveld & Gussenhoven 1985; Pàmies et al. 2002; Fernández Planas & Martínez Celdrán 2003: 172).The analyses of the data indicate that the tonal structures found in the prosody of Madrid broadly coincide with those observed in previous investigations (Quilis 1993, 1997; Sosa 1999; Toledo 2003 y Face 2003). Nevertheless, the realization of pitch accents presents more variety than that postulated in prior studies, being the most common tonal structure L*+H and H*+L. Finally, these results suggest that the metrical structure of the tonic syllables can also affect the tonal structure of the pitch accent.