Preplanning and intonation in Peninsular Spanish.

Abstract

The goal of this paper was to test mental preplanning in the intonational behavior of Peninsular Spanish speakers. In one experiment of production, the P1 effect in data of sentences of increasing length was investigated in order to provide support to look-ahead strategies. In a second experiment, the weight of clause syntactic boundaries in local fall–rise patterns (and versus but versus that versus noun phrase and) as explored with the aim to examine cognitive processes connected with global preplanning, tonal encoding, and syntax. Measurements were made through digital contours of three male speakers from different Mediterranean dialects. Here, F0 results did not confirm any effect of preplanning: P1 showed no correlation with length; fall–rise patterns were similar in all linguistic conditions. These findings were in perfect accord with previous results in American Spanish corpora [G. Toledo and J. Gurlekian, in EstudiosdeFonéticaExperimental, edited by E. Martínez Celdrán (University of Barcelona, Barcelona, 1990), Vol. IV, pp. 27–49].