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Investigating Prosodic Prominence in Spontaneous New Mexican Spanish.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Investigating Prosodic Prominence in Spontaneous New Mexican Spanish./
Author:	Benevento, Nicole M.
Description:	1 online resource (241 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-04(E), Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International79-04A(E).
Subject:	Language. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9780355329773

Investigating Prosodic Prominence in Spontaneous New Mexican Spanish.
Benevento, Nicole M.

Investigating Prosodic Prominence in Spontaneous New Mexican Spanish. - 1 online resource (241 pages)

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-04(E), Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Includes bibliographical references

This dissertation examines how the most prominent syllable in a word is manifested in the spontaneous, narrative speech of Spanish speakers in northern New Mexico and how native Spanishspeaking listeners perceive prominent syllables of words extracted from continuous speech. Much of what is currently known about the prominence of lexically stressed syllables is derived from formal sentence elicitation tasks produced in the laboratory environment. A corpus study analyzing 142 simple declarative utterances produced by four speakers (2 female; 2 male) of Traditional New Mexican Spanish shows that, in agreement with much of the previous research, longer vowel durations and fundamental frequency movement are often correlated with lexically stressed syllables in Spanish. Tonic vowels show longer average durations than the immediately surrounding unstressed vowels---particularly in the pre-tonic context---in both the presence and absence of fundamental frequency movement. Content words in the sample show a deaccentuation rate of 28% and a 45% early-alignment rate for pre-nuclear 'accentable' syllables. Despite traditional descriptions of pre-nuclear syllables in broad focus declaratives displaying late peak alignment, a comparison of early-alignment rates in this variety with the (semi-)spontaneous speech of other varieties of Spanish shows New Mexican Spanish to fall well within the range of variation. The role of vowel energy in cuing lexical stress and prominence is less consistent in the research and in the present sample proves to be highly speaker-dependent. Pairwise comparison shows a significant drop in vowel clarity in the pre-tonic environment, which coupled with shorter durations, may serve to further highlight the upcoming stressed syllable in continuous speech. A separate pilot experiment examines how native Spanish-speaking listeners perceive prominent syllables, exploring the role of the fundamental frequency peak and other perceptual factors (i.e., duration and intensity) when making prominence judgments. Listeners' responses to both unfiltered and low pass band filtered items show a bias toward penultimate judgments of prominence in the aggregate. Listener accuracy is increased when the fundamental frequency peak is aligned within the stressed syllable, but when lexical stress and the F0 peak are misaligned some asymmetries emerge. Listeners seem to rely heavily on the F0 peak for antepenultimate-accented items, whereas there is a strong tendency to judge penultimate prominence even when the fundamental frequency curve reaches its peak on the final syllable. The findings in the present dissertation contribute to our understanding of how prominence is marked in natural, conversational discourse and suggest avenues for future research into testing whether prominence perception is reliant on listeners' experiences with language, actual cues in the acoustic signal, or a combination of both.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2018

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9780355329773Subjects--Topical Terms:

571568
Language.
Index Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Investigating Prosodic Prominence in Spontaneous New Mexican Spanish.
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100 1 $a Benevento, Nicole M. $3 1184060
245 1 0 $a Investigating Prosodic Prominence in Spontaneous New Mexican Spanish.
264 0 $c 2017
300 $a 1 online resource (241 pages)
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500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-04(E), Section: A.
500 $a Adviser: John M. Lipski.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.) $c The Pennsylvania State University $d 2017.
504 $a Includes bibliographical references
520 $a This dissertation examines how the most prominent syllable in a word is manifested in the spontaneous, narrative speech of Spanish speakers in northern New Mexico and how native Spanishspeaking listeners perceive prominent syllables of words extracted from continuous speech. Much of what is currently known about the prominence of lexically stressed syllables is derived from formal sentence elicitation tasks produced in the laboratory environment. A corpus study analyzing 142 simple declarative utterances produced by four speakers (2 female; 2 male) of Traditional New Mexican Spanish shows that, in agreement with much of the previous research, longer vowel durations and fundamental frequency movement are often correlated with lexically stressed syllables in Spanish. Tonic vowels show longer average durations than the immediately surrounding unstressed vowels---particularly in the pre-tonic context---in both the presence and absence of fundamental frequency movement. Content words in the sample show a deaccentuation rate of 28% and a 45% early-alignment rate for pre-nuclear 'accentable' syllables. Despite traditional descriptions of pre-nuclear syllables in broad focus declaratives displaying late peak alignment, a comparison of early-alignment rates in this variety with the (semi-)spontaneous speech of other varieties of Spanish shows New Mexican Spanish to fall well within the range of variation. The role of vowel energy in cuing lexical stress and prominence is less consistent in the research and in the present sample proves to be highly speaker-dependent. Pairwise comparison shows a significant drop in vowel clarity in the pre-tonic environment, which coupled with shorter durations, may serve to further highlight the upcoming stressed syllable in continuous speech. A separate pilot experiment examines how native Spanish-speaking listeners perceive prominent syllables, exploring the role of the fundamental frequency peak and other perceptual factors (i.e., duration and intensity) when making prominence judgments. Listeners' responses to both unfiltered and low pass band filtered items show a bias toward penultimate judgments of prominence in the aggregate. Listener accuracy is increased when the fundamental frequency peak is aligned within the stressed syllable, but when lexical stress and the F0 peak are misaligned some asymmetries emerge. Listeners seem to rely heavily on the F0 peak for antepenultimate-accented items, whereas there is a strong tendency to judge penultimate prominence even when the fundamental frequency curve reaches its peak on the final syllable. The findings in the present dissertation contribute to our understanding of how prominence is marked in natural, conversational discourse and suggest avenues for future research into testing whether prominence perception is reliant on listeners' experiences with language, actual cues in the acoustic signal, or a combination of both.
533 $a Electronic reproduction. $b Ann Arbor, Mich. : $c ProQuest, $d 2018
538 $a Mode of access: World Wide Web
650 4 $a Language. $3 571568
650 4 $a Linguistics. $3 557829
655 7 $a Electronic books. $2 local $3 554714
690 $a 0679
690 $a 0290
710 2 $a ProQuest Information and Learning Co. $3 1178819
710 2 $a The Pennsylvania State University. $b Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. $3 1184061
773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 79-04A(E).
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=10666435 $z click for full text (PQDT)