Journal of Experimental Phonetics

Towards a phonetic history of the voices of Spanish poets

Valentina Colonna — 2024-02-20

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

Sofia Alejandra Villalva Camacho — 2024-03-05

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

Zoi Kotsoni — 2024-03-06

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.