Spanish in Context - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2019

The Andes mountain system serves as a natural border throughout several South American countries. This research takes place in the region known as the Northern Andes, in two of the most important cities of the Venezuelan and Colombian Andes: Mérida, State of Mérida, and Medellin, Department of Antioquia.

The main purpose of this study is to establish intonation similarities and differences between these two Andean cities. As a preliminary study, part of the AMPER Project, it examines the F0 as a melodic support. The study has been conducted according to the parameters established in the above-mentioned project.

The intention of this research is twofold: First, to accomplish one of the main AMPER goals of performing comparative studies among diverse Romance languages and its varieties; and secondly, to establish possible relationships and differences among language varieties that are in contact, despite being separated by borderlines.

This article deals with the intonational realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation studies with a total of ten bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and Yucatec Maya (YM) and five monolingual speakers of YS suggest that contrastive focus in the Yucatecan Spanish variant spoken by the Spanish-dominant and monolingual speakers is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the intonation phrase (IP) followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety crucially differs from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive constituent is generally associated with an L+H* pitch accent (cf. de-la-Mota, Martín Butragueño & Prieto. 2010). However, the systematicity described above only shows up in the data produced by the Spanish-dominant and monolingual YS speakers, whereas the balanced bilingual data is characterized by much higher idiosyncratic variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems is also a matter of consolidation or strengthening of features.

This paper analyses and studies the melodic behavior of five female informants of Mexican origin or descent, three of them residents in the city of Los Angeles in the United States, and two in Mexico, one in Mexico City and the other in Puebla. There are two main objectives: firstly, to contribute to the prosodic description of Mexican Spanish on both sides of the political border between both countries (declarative statements and neutral absolute interrogatives), and secondly, to verify the continuity between the Mexican-American intonation of LA and that of MX Mexican. We followed the methodology developed by the research groups that make up Amper-Mexico and Amper-California Los Angeles, within the framework of the international AMPER project.

In this study two techniques were used to analyze the linguistic rhythm of Mexican Spanish/English bilinguals in Los Angeles (California): (i)-nPVI, consisting of measurements of durations of successive pairs of vowels, and (ii)-voicing ratios, consisting of a function that calculates the voiced and voiceless portions of the signal. The speech of forty-nine participants in five groups was examined: (G1)-twelve native speakers of English, (G2)-eight Mexican Sp/Eng adult bilinguals who have been in L.A. since childhood, (G3)-eleven Mexican Sp/Eng young bilinguals descendants of immigrants and born in L.A., (G4)-seven Mexican Sp/Eng adult bilinguals who moved to L.A. as adults and (G5)-eleven native speakers of Spanish who have stayed in L.A. for a short period of time. Both methodologies indicate that G1 and G2 show English-like rhythm in both languages while G4 and G5 present Spanish-like rhythm. G3 accommodates rhythm depending on the language. Results reveal how rhythm can suffer attrition and transfer processes depending on the age or length of exposure to the L2. The study also highlights the unique linguistic situation of Los Angeles where members of the Mexican community have different levels of exposure to the Spanish and English languages.

The current study analyses the intonation of three types of utterances (broad focus statements, information-seeking yes-no questions and information-seeking wh-questions) in Galician and Spanish, in order to research the effects on the intonation of the prolonged contact between these two languages in Galicia. The main aims are to detect possible hybridisation processes in the intonation of these varieties and determine whether the intonation behaviour is different depending on the language used or on the language profile of the speakers. To that end, this study presents an empirical study which analyses these three types of utterances in Spanish and Galician, produced by 22 informants with different linguistic profiles. The results indicate little variability in the intonation based on the initial and habitual languages of the speakers or the language in which they produce the corpus. However, the existence of some hybrid patterns in wh-questions has been detected. The theoretical implications of these results will be discussed within the framework of hybridisation.

Social situations of language coexistence have resulted in linguistic manifestations of bilingualism and diglossia, including linguistic interference, lexical loans and code switching.

What role does prosody play in social bilingualism? In other words, when contact between different languages is not restricted to the individual but affects an entire speech community, does a dominant prosody exist? Does prosody vary among different linguistic varieties?

In order to find an answer to these questions, we hereby show the results of a research project on the prosodic features of Asturian and Castilian spoken in the centre of Asturias. This experimental study is based on the speech of four informants from Oviedo – two men and two women – two of which speak Castilian, while the other two speak Asturian.

In several languages, two stresses cannot appear adjacently in the speech chain, and a variety of solutions have been found to be used to resolve this disfavored juxtaposition. According to various different authors, a common strategy for solving stress clash is the non-realization of the first stress and, typically, a transfer of all stress parameters to the pre-tonic syllable.

This study aims to describe how stress clash is solved in three Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan, and Friulian) and two sentence-types (broad focus statements and information-seeking yes-no questions). The first two languages behave similarly, insofar as length and loudness are not stress-supporting parameters, and F0 maintains the general patterns of the type of sentence. Friulian stands out because length is the main stress parameter and tonic syllables are significantly longer, even when there is a stress clash. F0 also follows the general sentence type pattern, with one exception: declarative sentences in NP1, where the pre-tonic syllable is always higher than its corresponding tonic.

Mandarin Chinese and Spanish are the first two languages in the world by number of speakers. The interaction between speakers and thus between the two languages increases day by day. There are more and more Chinese students who study Spanish and Spanish students who study Chinese. At the same time, difficulties arise from the teaching-learning process, particularly with regard to phonetics, and more specifically the intonation, as they are two typologically-different languages. However, there exist very few comparative studies between them.

This article seeks to explore the global declination of intonation groups in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese and we found similarities and differences between these two languages. To do this, we created a corpus of 278 isolated and unmarked sentences and 140 neutral paragraphs in Mandarin Chinese (totally 651 sentences), while in Spanish we used data from previous studies. The corpus was recorded by nine native speakers, three men and six women.

We approached this study from a phonetic point of view and used the Garrido model (Garrido 1996, 2001, 2010) to compare the declination effect on the two languages according to different factors such as sentence type, the position of the intonation group within the utterance and length of the group.

We also proposed for future study some possible methods for teaching Chinese and Spanish intonation as a second language.

This paper contains the results of a set of perception tests that aimed at measuring perceived prosodic distances between different Romance languages (Italian, Friulian, Sardinian, Catalan, and Spanish). Data were collected within the framework of the AMPER project. The results were obtained by means of discrimination and identification tasks where the judges were 31 native speakers of Catalan form Barcelona and the stimuli were broad focus statements and yes-no questions in the above-mentioned languages. The perceived distances are then compared with the results of a dialectometric analysis of acoustic data. This comparison shows that the perceived distances are related to acoustic differences.