Journal of Experimental Phonetics

Towards a phonetic history of the voices of Spanish poets

Valentina Colonna — 2024-07-04

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 — 2024-07-04

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 — 2024-07-04

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

Francisco Javier Perea Siller — 2024-07-05

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

Dorota Krajewska — 2024-07-12

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

Antonio Hidalgo Navarro — 2024-07-10

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.

A cross-linguistic study of L3 speech perception of voiced and voiceless stops

Irina Stan — 2024-09-04

The study examines the perception of labial stops by English(L1)/Spanish(L2) [Group A] and Spanish(L1)/English(L2) [Group B] learners of French (L3). We investigate Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI) processes of L3 speech perception by looking at how the previously acquired languages shape L3 perception (progressive CLI) and how an L3 affects the categorization of L2 and L1 sounds (regressive CLI). The possibility that L3 speakers have a single perception system for all languages was also examined. Participants had to identify stimuli from a VOT continuum as either /p/ or /b/, in different languages. Evidence of hybrid L1/L2→L3 progressive cross-linguistic influence was found for Group A and only L1→L3 for Group B. No patterns of regressive CLI were observed. Finally, it is not always the case that trilinguals make use of different perception systems when listening to L1, L2 and L3.

Ambisyllabic characteristics of Spanish resyllabification: Beyond durational cues

José María Lahoz-Bengoechea — 2024-09-04

In Spanish coda segments are resyllabified as the onset of a following onsetless syllable across a word boundary. Thus, buscabas ocio (‘you were looking for entertainment’) has been traditionally syllabified in the same way as buscaba socio (‘s/he was looking for an associate’), and both are considered homophones. In this study nineteen speakers were recorded producing sentences that included such two-word minimal pairs, making up a total of 1424 utterances. The acoustic analyses performed on both prosodic structures, i.e. /V#CV/ vs. /V#CV/, provide measures of amplitude, spectral characteristics, and coarticulation for /s/, /n/, and /l/, as well as for their flanking vowels. Our results show differences for each condition and suggest an ambisyllabic nature of resyllabified consonants, which is interpreted within the framework of Articulatory Phonology.

How language-specific and cross-linguistic factors affect speech rhythm

Nafiseh Taghva — 2024-09-23

This study examined the durational aspects of speech rhythm in Bengali (L1) and English spoken by educated Bengali advanced English learners (L2) to represent the effect of language-specific and cross-linguistic factors on speech rhythm. Employing metrics such as rateSyl, ΔC, nPVI-C, nPVI-V, VarcoV, %V, and ΔPeakLn, the study revealed that L1 exhibited a faster tempo, shorter consonants, and longer vowels relative to consonants, while L2 speech demonstrated greater variability in consonant and vowel durations, which are language-specific factors of L1 being a syllable-timed language and L2 being a stress-timed language. However, sonority patterns between syllables seemed consistent across L1 and L2 suggesting the cross-linguistic impact of L1 on L2. Moreover, the results identified the proportion of vocalic intervals (%V) as the most effective metric for differentiating between L1 and L2 rhythms.