Frequency and relevance of the initial high peak’s overshooting in Spanish

Abstract

With this work, we aim to analyze the behaviour of the initial high peak in the declaratives and interrogatives of the Spanish language. Previous studies have shown that such peak presents, on certain occasions, a double trend, as it may either coincide with the lexical stress or align with the syntagmatic boundaries. In case of the latter, a particular phenomenon known as tonal displacement or overshooting occurs. The task at hand is to study the guidelines following such displacement from a double-sided point of view: on the one hand, to confront a formal speech corpus and a semispontaneous one in order to determine the diaphasic variation's influence on this phenomenon; on the other hand, by comparing different diatopic varieties, to check whether that high peak works as a differentiating index between them or, on the contrary, if it links them further. For this, an analysis has been made of the fundamental frequency (F0) of declarative and interrogative emissions (SVO) which combine the stressed final syllable (oxytone), stressed second-to-last syllable (paroxytone) and stressed third-to-last syllable (proparoxytone) at their extremes. These have been extracted from an ad hoc corpus (or formal) and from another one obtained with the Map task technique. These phrases were emitted by 34 women and men from an urban origin and without higher studies. These were also representative members from the four varieties of Spanish to which they ascribe to: Canarian, Cuban, Venezuelan and Texan. It has been set, as a reference, the psychoacoustic threshold of 1,5 St (Rietveld and Gussenhoven, 1985; Pamies et al., 2002) in order to establish what F0 movements are significative from the perceptive point of view. The initial pitch accent has also been tagged in the framing of the AM model, stemming from the approaches proposed at Dorta & Díaz (2018).