Tonal Crowding Effects In Buenos Aires Spanish: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Abstract This study provides insight into the consequences of tonal crowding in Buenos Aires Spanish, enriching our current knowledge of the phonetic phenomena in this variety of Spanish. The present work is an experimental study that elicits 270 broad focus declarative statements in varying degrees of tonal crowding from five native speakers of this dialect. To achieve this, the number of unstressed syllables between stressed syllables in content words was manipulated to observe how the scaling and alignment of L and H tones, rise times, and syllable durations in prenuclear pitch accents all respond in different phonetic conditions. The results indicate that temporal and scaling reorganization is a prerequisite for the realization of two pitch accents in tonal crowding situations in Buenos Aires Spanish, though in ways differing from other dialects of Spanish. The first pitch accent remains largely unaffected, while the second pitch accent appears to be deaccented entirely.