Foco en el español mediterráneo

Abstract

This study explored the acoustic realization of focus in several dialects of Mediterranean Peninsular Spanish. The materials consisted of two corpora of declarative sentences with differences of neutral versus broad versus narrow focus and neutral versus single versus dual focus triggered by wh-question contexts. For that goal values of focal prominence in three prosodic parameters, F0, duration, and amplitude, were investigated through intonation contours and digital spectrograms of seven male speakers' emissions. The statistical analysis of the measurements has shown no acoustic differences among focused and unfocused items, and among sentences in the two corpora. The results provided support for prior studies in American and Canary Spanish which were undertaken through similar experimental designs. However, these data appeared to contradict the general findings reported elsewhere which have shown a higher degree of prominence in the marking of focus both in cognate languages like French and in Germanic languages.