No abstract

Recent work on Spanish intonation has shown that words in narrow focus often have an F0 peak within the stressed syllable, while when not in focus the peak generally follows the stressed syllable. Agreement has not been reached, however, as to an appropriate phonological analysis of this intonation pattern. It is shown here that this early F0 peak is the result of a focal pitch accent rather than the phonetic effect of a following intermediate phrase boundary. In addition, it is shown that this is not the only strategy in Spanish for conveying narrow focus through intonation, as increased F0 peak height may also be used. While either strategy may be used to convey focus in different positions within an utterance, there is a difference in frequency which is explained based on the ability to counteract downstep in all positions except initial position, where there is no previous peak from which to downstep.

The present study compares the intonation of Spanish declarative utterances in lab speech and spontaneous speech. Most studies of Spanish intonation have used lab speech, collected in an experimental setting and often scripted. This allows the researcher to control many factors, but the results cannot be assumed to be representative of spontaneous speech. The present study takes the most characteristic traits of the intonation of declarative sentences in Spanish lab speech and examines whether the same traits exist in spontaneous speech. It is shown that there are notable differences between the intonation of Spanish declaratives in lab speech and spontaneous speech. While some of the differences are minor, others are quite significant. Differences of one degree or another exist in the areas of the presence of F0 rises through stressed syllables, F0 peak alignment, downstepping, final lowering and deaccenting.

This paper employs Castilian Spanish data to examine the issue of rising pitch accents and their phonological analysis. The preliminary Sp_ToBI annotation conventions are shown to be inadequate for representing the Castilian Spanish data, and therefore a revision is proposed. Through an examination of data on Castilian Spanish rising accents in a variety of sentence types, two primary contributions are made in this paper. First, new empirical data on the inventory of rising pitch accents in Castilian Spanish is provided, showing that there is a three-way contrast that must be accounted for. Secondly, an analysis of rising accents is proposed that is based on the secondary association of pitch accent tones that not only is able to account for the three-way contrast in rising accents, but which offers a more straightforward manner of assigning starredness in bitonal pitch accents. 1 It should be noted that Ortiz Lira (1999), prior to the Sp_ToBI workshop, had attempted to apply the ToBI system of English (Beckman & Ayers 1994) to the Spanish of Chile. The Sp_ToBI system proposed by Beckman et al. (2002), however, has been more widely recognized, likely due at least in part to its broader

Findings from a cross-sectional study of the Spanish vowel productions of sixty adult second language learners of Spanish are presented in this article. The data set is based upon digitally recorded readings of an authentic Spanish-language short story. An acoustic examination of F1 and F2 values was carried out on twenty tokens of each vowel, 10 in stressed syllables, 10 in unstressed. The findings show that learners in the early stages of their Spanish study struggle to produce vowels in a native-like way, but the vowels of more advanced learners are similar to those of native speakers. The unstressed vowels of all learners are produced with some degree of centralization, confirming the much theorized influence of English on Spanish vowel productions.