Accents in Spanish: Spontaneous speech

Abstract

The goal of this work was the experimental confirmation of the assignment of the primary accent (A1), of the secondary accent (A2) and of the tertiary accent (A3) in the word. The theoretical rules proposed the assignment of stress according to this prosodic pattern: in trisyllabic paroxytone words: A2 + A1 + A3, in tetrasyllabic paroxytone words: A2 + A3 + A1 + A3, in trisyllabic oxytone words: A2 + A3 + A1, in trisyllabic proparoxytone words: A1 + A3 + A2. A corpus of spontaneous narrative of Argentinian speakers and an excerpt of spontaneous conversation were studied. Temporal and tonal data were calculated. The results did not confirm the rules. On the contrary, temporal and tonal prominence of A1, tonal similarities in other accents, isochrony effects and final lenghtening were observed.