Tonal alignment, syllable structure, and word stress effects in Manchego Spanish nuclear falls
Nick Henriksen from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures will present in Phondi today. The title of his presentation, including an abstract, is given below.
Tonal alignment, syllable structure, and word stress effects in Manchego Spanish nuclear falls
This study explores tonal alignment patterns in falling nuclear pitch accents (H+L*) in Manchego Spanish. Six speakers participated in a production experiment, yielding 474 test sentences submitted to acoustic analysis. Tonal alignment data were extracted for the H(igh) and L(ow) turning points of the nuclear falling gesture in order to determine the effect of syllable structure (i.e. open vs. closed) and word stress (i.e. penultimate vs. ultimate). Results show no effect of syllable structure: in open and closed syllables the H target is aligned before the start of the nuclear syllable, and the L target is aligned within the vowel of the same syllable. We reject the hypothesis that the L target aligns with the right edge of the accented syllable; coda consonants do not provoke later L tone alignment. Regarding word stress, a subtle effect was found whereby Low targets undergo retraction within the nuclear vowel in oxytone words. All in all, the tonal alignment patterns have implications for views on tune-text coordination in intonational phonology, namely the segmental anchoring hypothesis and the segmental coupling hypothesis.
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