The role of lexical stress on vowel space and duration in two varieties of Spanish

Fabian Santiago (1, 2, 3) , Paolo Mairano (4)

1 SFL - Structures Formelles du Langage
2 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
3 LLF UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle
4 UNITO - Università degli studi di Torino = University of Turin

This paper investigates the effects of lexical stress on vowel durations, vowel space and vowel quality in Spanish. Data come from oral productions of 22 Spanish speakers (10 from Madrid and 12 from Mexico City) performing different tasks. As for durational cues, we found that vowel durations play a role as a cue of lexical stress. Interestingly, our results also show differences between the two varieties (the stressed-unstressed ratio being larger for Mexican than Madrilenian speakers). Instead, we show that the expansion/compression of the vowel space is not affected by lexical stress, but it does seem to be affected by the task type. We found, however, that lexical stress can affect vowel quality in certain cases: unstressed /a/ and /o/ tend to be centralized. We discuss these results in the light of previous research reporting effects of lexical stress on vowel spectral quality in different varieties of Spanish

Mots clés: vowel reduction; vowel space; vowel quality; lexical stress

Domaines: Linguistique

Fabian Santiago, Paolo Mairano. The role of lexical stress on vowel space and duration in two varieties of Spanish. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Jun 2018, Poznan, Poland. pp.453-457, ⟨10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-92⟩. ⟨hal-01717914⟩