The relevance of prosodic structure in tonal articulation Edge effects at the prosodic word level in Catalan and Spanish

Pilar Prieto, Eva Estebas-Vilaplana, Maria del Mar Vanrell
2010 Journal of Phonetics  
A production experiment with 1600 potentially ambiguous utterances distinguished by word boundary location in Catalan and Spanish (e.g., Cat. mirà batalles '(s)he looked at battles' vs. mirava talles 'I/(s)he used to look at carvings'; Span. da balazos '(s)he fires shots' vs. daba lazos 'I/(s)he gave ribbons'; stressed syllables are underlined) was undertaken. Results revealed strong (and statistically significant) effects of within-word position on H location, in such a way that peaks tended
more » ... be timed earlier when their associated syllables occurred later in the word than when they occurred earlier in the word, confirming previous results for other languages (Silverman & Pierrehumbert 1990 for English; Arvaniti et al. 1998 for Greek; and Ishihara 2006 for Japanese; Godjevac 2000 for Serbo-Croatian) and for Spanish and Catalan (Prieto et al. 1995 for Spanish; de la Mota 2005, Simonet 2006, Simonet & Torreira 2005 for Catalan). In the light of these results, the production experiment was followed up by a set of perception experiments with the goal of determining whether listeners are able to use H alignment information for lexical access. The results of these latter experiments supported the hypothesis that Catalan and Spanish listeners are able to employ fine allophonic details of H tonal alignment due to within-word position to identify lexical items that are ambiguous for word-boundary position. The empirical evidence discussed in this paper contributes to our understanding of the temporal organization of tonal gestures and their patterns of coordination with segments. The data advocates a view in which prosodic structure plays an essential part in our understanding of the coordination of pitch gestures with the segments.
doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2010.10.004 fatcat:5mnoyigsovgi5oiqthxeu72cui