Current Research:
Following my interest in the intonation of the dialects of Spanish, my current goal is to provide phonetic and phonological descriptions of the prosody - accent, intonation, rhythm - of the Spanish spoken in Los Angeles.
Previous Research:
Robles-Puente, Sergio. 2011. Modeling Imperatives in Spanish. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 130, issue 4, p. 2553.
The intonation of imperatives in Spanish has traditionally been considered to not differ systematically from that of declaratives. This study shows that given the appropriate contexts, imperatives can exhibit unique phonetic properties. Nine speakers of Peninsular Spanish produced imperatives in response to instructions that elicited different levels of imperativity, along with control declarative items. Results show that while imperatives may fail to differ from declaratives in some conditions, when the context requires a stronger imperative, speakers use intonational configurations not found in declaratives. These include higher F0 values and changes in the overall pitch contour with higher F0 values toward the end of the sentence, different boundary tones and different F0 peak alignments. A perceptual experiment with 13 speakers confirmed the relevance of these intonational modulations by demonstrating that the strategies that were more commonly used in the production experiment were preferred over others to express imperativity. Results can be modeled within the framework of grammar dynamics (Gafos and Benus, 2006. Cognitive Science, 30, 837–862).
Robles-Puente, Sergio. 2011. Looking for the Spanish Imperative Intonation: Combination of Global and Pitch-Accent Level Strategies. In Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology, ed. Scott M. Alvord, 153-164. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. www.lingref.com, document #2644.
Recent studies show that Spanish dialects have different ways of expressing imperativity via intonation. However, declarative and imperative intonations have also been equated. This study shows that although declarative-like F0-patterns can be used to express imperativity in Peninsular Spanish, when there is an extra need to convey an imperative meaning, they are abandoned and suprasegmental variables of imperativity emerge. These variables can complement or substitute each other and can happen at the pitch-accent level or at the global level of the sentence. A perceptual experiment also shows the preference of certain variables and F0 configurations over others to express imperativity.
Robles-Puente, Sergio. 2011. Absolute Questions Do Not Always Have a Rising Pattern: Evidence from Bilbao Spanish. In Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology, ed. Scott M. Alvord, 98-107. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. www.lingref.com, document #2638.
The current work presents findings from an instrumental study of Bilbao Spanish, an understudied variety spoken in Northern Spain, demonstrating that low boundary tones can be widely used in Spanish absolute interrogatives. The pattern found in the productions clearly differs from the one found in other Peninsular varieties like Madrid Spanish. Interestingly, due to different pitch movements and peak alignments, the F0 contours produced by Bilbao Spanish speakers are also different from those attested in other varieties that use low boundary tones like Puerto Rican Spanish. The relevance of these characteristics is brought forward by perceptual data as well.