The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese INVESTIGATING PROSODIC PROMINENCE IN SPONTANEOUS NEW MEXICAN SPANISH A Dissertation in Spanish and Language Science by Nicole M. Benevento © 2017 Nicole M. Benevento Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2017 ii The dissertation of Nicole M. Benevento was reviewed and approved* by the following: John M. Lipski Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and Linguistics Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Rena Torres Cacoullos Professor of Spanish and Linguistics Marianna Nadeu Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics Richard Page Associate Professor of German and Linguistics Maria Truglio Associate Professor of Italian and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Interim Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT 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 Spanish- speaking 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. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................. xiii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................. xvi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 General Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Basic Theories of Stress Assignment .................................................................................... 3 1.3 What is prominence? ............................................................................................................. 6 1.4 Acoustic correlates of prominence ........................................................................................ 7 CHAPTER 2 STRESS AND PROMINENCE IN SPANISH ........................................................................ 10 2.1 Stress assignment in Spanish .............................................................................................. 10 2.2 The acoustic correlates of prominence in Spanish .............................................................. 11 2.2.1 Disentangling stress from accent .................................................................................. 11 2.2.2 Prominence in production experiments ........................................................................ 13 2.2.3 Prominence in perception experiments......................................................................... 17 2.2.4 Summary of prominence in Spanish ............................................................................. 19 2.3 Prominence in lab vs. spontaneous speech ......................................................................... 19 2.4 Tones and Break Indices framework ................................................................................... 23 2.4.1 Sp_ToBI........................................................................................................................ 25 2.4.2 ToBI limitations ............................................................................................................ 26 2.5 Research questions .............................................................................................................. 26 CHAPTER 3 THE SPEECH COMMUNITY .......................................................................................... 28 3.1 The New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual Corpus ......................................................... 28 3.1.1 The NMSEB corpus in the literature ............................................................................ 30 3.2 Social and linguistic influences on the Spanish of northern New Mexico .......................... 33 3.2.1 Societal influences on language use ............................................................................. 33 3.2.2 Prosodic features of Mexican Spanish declaratives ..................................................... 36 3.3 Linguistic features of traditional New Mexican Spanish .................................................... 38 3.4 NMSEB speakers ................................................................................................................ 40 3.4.1 SANDRA ......................................................................................................................... 41 3.4.2. ROCÍO ........................................................................................................................... 49 v 3.4.3 RUBÉN and VÍCTOR ....................................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER 4 PRODUCTION OF PROMINENCE IN THE NEW MEXICAN SPANISH-ENGLISH (NMSEB) CORPUS .......................................................................................................................................... 58 4.1 Purpose ................................................................................................................................ 58 4.2 Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 58 4.2.1 Data selection procedure and exclusions ...................................................................... 60 4.2.2 Data measuring/coding procedures .............................................................................. 61 4.2.2.1 Duration ................................................................................................................. 62 4.2.2.2 Intensity .................................................................................................................. 63 4.2.2.3 Fundamental frequency ......................................................................................... 63 4.2.2.4 Spectral balance..................................................................................................... 63 4.2.2.5 Harmonics-to-Noise ratio (HNR) .......................................................................... 65 4.2.2.6 Pitch accent ............................................................................................................ 66 4.3 Results ................................................................................................................................. 69 4.3.1 Sentences .....................................................................................................................