Comprensión rítmica en el español caribeño: habla espontánea

Abstract

This paper reports findings of temporal compression through the acoustic analysis of spontaneous speech in a dialect of Caribbean Venezuelan Spanish. The materials were emitted by a female speaker of a low sociolectal level in an interview dialogue. The corpus was segmented in three prosodic and hierarchical levels: syllables within rhythmic groups embedded in intonational phrases. Measurements on duration of the emissions were taken from oscillographic traces and spectrograms. Results indicated a similar temporal pattern: low degree of compression in pre-stress syllables and degrees of deceleration in stressed syllables or in post-stress syllables, a compensatory effect. In addition, rhythmic group-boundary syllables were longer and intonational phrase-boundary syllables were the longest. The findings suggest a tendency to syllable-timing in pre-stress positions and a strong effect of final lengthening from the stress.