Journal of Experimental Phonetics

Towards a phonetic history of the voices of Spanish poets

2024-02-28T11:02:03+00:00

How does the voice of a poet sound? Poetry reading, an essential component of this art, represents interesting material for phonetic studies. However, it remains an under-researched topic. This work attempts to go beyond the state of the art, providing an experimental analysis of some voices of the Generation of ’27, aiming to mark the first step towards a phonetic history of the voices of Spanish poets. This research, which employs a qualitative phonetic approach and a statistical approach, has brought to light some principal elements. These include variation as a consistent element among authors and within a single author, enabling the detection of main features and sub-groups; common features marking a global grouping; and the possible variety and criticism of clusters, revealing the complexity of this speech and the effectiveness of our model to describe it.

Entonación y emociones en hablantes del estado de Querétaro, México

2024-03-11T13:28:22+00:00

The present investigation describes the variations of the fundamental frequency (F0) in assertive acts of speech when adjacently express emotions such as happiness, sadness and anger and the influence that factors such as age, sex and level of instruction have on it. For this purpose, a semi-controlled test was designed in which a total of 18 participants produced the same sentence in all the three emotions plus a non-emotional sentence. Data was analyzed using Praat in its 6.1.50 version and the label system Sp_ToBI. The results show the existence of a statistically significant variation of the F0 when happiness and anger are expressed and the influence of social factors such as sex and level of instruction in the variation of the F0.

Detailing the impact of social variables on the production of the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts by early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals

2024-03-11T13:42:56+00:00

The present study investigates variability in the production of Catalan vowels by Barcelona young, middle-aged, and older adults who speak the Central Catalan variety. The degree of exposure to and use of Central Catalan varies among speakers as half of the participants are second-generation and subsequent-generation migrants from other regions of Spain, where the vernacular is Spanish. All speakers have been born, raised, and schooled in Barcelona, and have acquired both Central Catalan and Spanish. Central Catalan possesses two sets of phonemic mid-vowels (/e/–/ε/ and /o/–/ↄ/), unlike Spanish which has a single vowel per set (/e/ and /o/). This study aims to detail the Catalan mid-front and mid-back vowel contrasts used by speakers of different gender, age, language use, and exposure to Catalan from the bilingual speech community of Barcelona.

Papel de los suprasegmentos en la construcción de la (macro)estructura discursiva

2024-05-30T10:15:22+00:00

This article examines the prosodic elements involved in the internal structuration of monological discourses (i.e. macrostructure), in two main aspects: the configuration of the paratones and the phonetic signals indicating the concatenation of the sentences. For that purpose, the Spanish parliamentary discourse will be analyzed. We will focus on the speeches delivered in the plenary sessions 246 and 247 of the Spanish Congress of Deputies of the XIV Legislature, held on March 21^st and 22^nd. These correspond to the motion of censure that the parliamentary group VOX lodged against the President of the Government and the subsequent debate. Common and idiosyncratic elements in the configuration of the textual macrostructure will be analyzed.

Lenition of fricative sibilants in casual conversations in Basque

2024-04-12T10:03:22+00:00

This paper analyses lenition of lamino-alveolar and apico-alveolar fricative sibilants in Basque in casual conversations between speakers of the variety of Beasain (Central Basque dialect). To describe the phonetic realisation of sibilants, the following measures were used: the proportion of voiced frames, the centre of gravity and relative intensity. Results show that 13% of sibilants can be classified as ‘voiced’ (i.e. they show uninterrupted voicing during the middle 50% of the duration) and another 25% has at least one voiced frame in the middle interval. Several factors were identified as important predictors of voicing: context, speech rate and the presence of the word boundary. It is also shown that voicing lowers the sibilants’ centre of gravity and relative intensity. Finally, the paper discusses potential lexical effects in lenition phenomena.

Diacronía prosódica del discurso formal en la España del siglo XX

2024-05-23T08:19:41+00:00

This study provides information about some suprasegmental changes experienced throughout the 20th century in relation to formal political and informational discourses. The corpus consists of 10 fragments belonging to the 1930s and 1990s, whose participants are relevant in their professional field. Considering their frequency in the studied corpus, the differential behavior of F0 in intonational contours has been described (presence/absence of internal intonational rises, final tonal emphasis of each contour, average F0 of each intonational contour), as well as the average duration of speech pauses, average speech rate, average intensity, and the greater/lesser presence of speech hesitations. The acoustic analysis of the results allows us to identify some trends associated with the different periods studied.