John Benjamins Publishing Company
Dialect identification and listener attributes
Abstract
This study investigates the perception of vowel-lengthening, a feature characteristic of the Spanish spoken in Córdoba, Argentina: the tonada cordobesa. Uniquely, the lengthening occurs on the pre-tonic syllable (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1971; Yorio, 1973; Lang, 2010), and is believed to be accompanied by a pitch peak (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1971). The goals of this experiment are to determine if duration alone (i.e. without intonational changes) is a strong enough cue for identifying speakers from Córdoba, and what listener features affect this perception. A matched-guise methodology is employed in which natural and manipulated (pre-tonic vowel duration) tokens are presented to Argentine listeners in a dialect identification task. Results show that longer pre-tonic vowel durations are associated with a Córdoba speaker origin, regardless of the speaker’s true regional origin or other linguistic cues.
Abstract
This study investigates the perception of vowel-lengthening, a feature characteristic of the Spanish spoken in Córdoba, Argentina: the tonada cordobesa. Uniquely, the lengthening occurs on the pre-tonic syllable (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1971; Yorio, 1973; Lang, 2010), and is believed to be accompanied by a pitch peak (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1971). The goals of this experiment are to determine if duration alone (i.e. without intonational changes) is a strong enough cue for identifying speakers from Córdoba, and what listener features affect this perception. A matched-guise methodology is employed in which natural and manipulated (pre-tonic vowel duration) tokens are presented to Argentine listeners in a dialect identification task. Results show that longer pre-tonic vowel durations are associated with a Córdoba speaker origin, regardless of the speaker’s true regional origin or other linguistic cues.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface vii
- Introduction xi
-
Part I. Theoretical and descriptive approaches
- No superiority, no intervention effects 3
- Overt PRO in Romance 25
- The semantics and pragmatics of andar and venir + gerund 49
- Sequence of tenses in complementation structures 69
- Fue muerto 89
- Temporal and spectral dependencies in the processing of Spanish and English stop consonant voicing 113
- Segmental and prosodic conditionings on gradient voicing assimilation in Spanish 127
-
Part II. Language acquisition
- The sum is more than its parts 147
- Does agreement affect the syntax of bare nominal subjects in Russian–Spanish bilinguals? 169
- Perfecting the past 191
- The protracted acquisition of past tense aspectual values in child heritage Spanish 211
-
Part III. Language contact and language variation
- Morphological adjectival intensifier variation in Lima, Peru 233
- An experimental approach to hypercorrection in Dominican Spanish 251
- Dialect identification and listener attributes 269
- Sociophonetic analysis of young Peninsular Spanish women’s voice quality 293
- A sociophonetic analysis of trill production in Panamanian Spanish 313
- Index 337
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface vii
- Introduction xi
-
Part I. Theoretical and descriptive approaches
- No superiority, no intervention effects 3
- Overt PRO in Romance 25
- The semantics and pragmatics of andar and venir + gerund 49
- Sequence of tenses in complementation structures 69
- Fue muerto 89
- Temporal and spectral dependencies in the processing of Spanish and English stop consonant voicing 113
- Segmental and prosodic conditionings on gradient voicing assimilation in Spanish 127
-
Part II. Language acquisition
- The sum is more than its parts 147
- Does agreement affect the syntax of bare nominal subjects in Russian–Spanish bilinguals? 169
- Perfecting the past 191
- The protracted acquisition of past tense aspectual values in child heritage Spanish 211
-
Part III. Language contact and language variation
- Morphological adjectival intensifier variation in Lima, Peru 233
- An experimental approach to hypercorrection in Dominican Spanish 251
- Dialect identification and listener attributes 269
- Sociophonetic analysis of young Peninsular Spanish women’s voice quality 293
- A sociophonetic analysis of trill production in Panamanian Spanish 313
- Index 337
