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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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Spanish prenuclear rising pitch accents have been described as having a Low tone consistently aligned near the onset of the tonic syllable and a High tone, whose alignment may vary depending on focus marking. An examination of Dominican Spanish (DS) reveals a previously unreported alignment pattern for Spanish. The DS data reveals a variable Low tone alignment; an early alignment near the tonic onset, and a late Low alignment, past the tonic midpoint, typically 100-180 ms into the tonic syllable. The High tone does not demonstrate two categories of alignment seen with the Low tone. The variation observed in the DS prenuclear pitch accent alignments provide clear evidence of intonational dialectal variation and contributes to the growing body of research on intonational variation in general.
Bibliographic reference. Willis, Erik W. (2003): "Prenuclear low tone alignment in Dominican Spanish", In ICPhS-15, 2941-2944.