14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999

Two Tendencies Toward Isochrony in Castilian Spanish Short Declarative Sentences

Takuya Kimura

Tamagawa University, Tokyo, Japan

A recording of 96 sentences read by two speakers of Castilian Spanish was analyzed acoustically to investigate the effects of the lexical stress upon two phonetic properties: syllable duration and F0 contours. The results suggest that there are two independent tendencies toward isochrony.
   Firstly, unstressed syllables tend to be shorter when there are more unstressed syllables between stressed ones, suggesting a tendency toward isochronous stress in this dialect, traditionally considered to be syllable-timed.
   Secondly, Fujisaki's F0 model was applied to the same recording, and a tendency was observed for the interval between two accent commands to be longer when it was too short, and to be shorter when it was too long. This can be seen as a tendency to isochronous occurrence of accent commands.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kimura, Takuya (1999): "Two tendencies toward isochrony in Castilian Spanish short declarative sentences", In ICPhS-14, 455-458.