14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Last Stressed Syllable and Group Accent in Venezuelan Spanish

Elsa Mora, Thania Villamizar, Manuel Rodríguez

Grupo de Investigación en Ciencias Fonéticas, Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela

This study presents the results of an acoustic analysis to clarif the features which define "group accent" in Venezuelan Spanish and its various dialectal varieties. The corpus which was used consists of a series of phrases extracted from the spontaneous speech of ten speakers. The signal was digitized and analyzed with the CSL of Kay Elemetrics. In order to establish the differences between "lexical' and "group" accent, the values of duration, fundamental frequency and intensity of the syllable carrying the first and last stress were compared to those of other stressed syllables. We conclude that the last stressed syllable of the intonation unit has a behavior which is different from the rest of the stressed syllables, manifested through a longer duration, a descent of F₀ and diminishing of intensity. These characteristics are significantly different in the various dialects of the same language variety.

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Bibliographic reference.  Mora, Elsa / Villamizar, Thania / Rodríguez, Manuel (1999): "Last stressed syllable and group accent in Venezuelan Spanish", In ICPhS-14, 937-940.