Fundamental frequency and its relationship to Spanish stress

Abstract

In the present work, we attempt to describe F0 movements and the amount of F0 change in the stressed syllables of Spanish sentences as a function of phonetic and linguistic effects. The material consisted of a list of 92 sentences with different syntactic structures which were recorded twice by a male speaker. Wideband spectrograms and F0 contours of all the sentences were obtained. F0 movements on the syllabic nucleus of each accented syllable were chosen as the parameters for the analysis of F0 contours. Results showed that the accented syllabic nucleus presents the following F0 movements: rise, fall, level, and rise-fall. These movements are correlated with effects such as the nature of the preceding consonant (level with voiceless, rise with voiced), position of the accented word (fall in the last accented word, rise in yes-no questions), and boundary (rise-fall or fall). Emphatic stress is correlated with increased F0 and larger F0 excursions. The amount of F0 change seems to follow a declination line. This general pattern is altered by different effects: lexical (adverbs, pronouns), syntactic (phrasal verbs, aposition, prepositional phrases, clauses, syntactic phrases), and semantic (modality operators, emphasis, prominent words).