In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utterances is not totally foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite different function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance-final intonational phrases, where a pronounced tendency for down-stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from Italian. As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.

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The present work examines the perceptual load carried by the relative intensity of the noise to the intensity of the vowel in the identification of the Argentine Spanish fricatives /s/ and /f/. The estimuli consisted of synthetic fricative-vowel syllables. The fricative portion, consisting of a fixed band noise with a central frequency of 4500 Hz and a bandwidth of 300 Hz, was varied in its relative amplitude to the vowel, to obtain a set of ten noise amplitudes in relation to the fixed vowel amplitude. Spanish listeners identified low amplitude noises as /f/ and high ones as /s/. In a second experiment, subjects were tested on the same stimuli at two different overall sound-pressure levels of the syllable: 60 and 80 dB. For the 80-dB level, subjects identified more /f/ sounds than at the 60-dB level. This result can be interpreted as a different interaction between the vocalic portion and the fricative noise. It is suggested that this kind of interaction may be due to a differential masking effect of the vowel at different amplitudes.

Fujisaki's intonation model parameterizes the F0's contour efficiently and becouse of its strong physiological basis has been successfully tested in different languages. One problem that has not been fully addressed is the extraction of the model's parameters, i.e., given a sentence, which model's parameter values best describe its intonation. Most of the proposed methods strive to optimize the parameters so as to obtain the best fit for the F0 contour globally. In this paper we propose to use text information from the sentence as the main guide or reference for adjusting the parameters. We present a method that defines a set of rules to fix and optimize the model's parameters. Optimization never loses sight of the text structure events that arouse it. When text information is not enough, the algorithm predicts parameters from F0 contour and tie it to the text. The process of parameter estimation can be seen as a way to go from text information to the F0 contour. Parameter optimization is carried out to fit the F0 contour locally. Our novel approach can be implemented manually or automatically. We present examples of manual implementation and the quantitative results of the automatic one. Tested on three corpora in Spanish, English and German, our automatic method shows a performance of 34% better than other tested methods.

ResumenSe amplían investigaciones precedentes, objetivando con nuevas mediciones, qué cambios inmediatos se producen, luego de la aplicación de la técnica de masaje laríngeo, en sujetos con disfonías músculo-tensional tipo I y II. Se utilizó el cálculo de valores de índices integrados del software ANAGRAF: Índice de perturbación integrado (IPI), Índice de precisión vocal articulatoria (IPA) y el Índice de aprovechamiento de la energía (IAE). El IPI, vinculado con alteraciones vocales en la fuente glotal (jitter y shimmer) y con alteraciones en el tracto vocal (relación armónico/ruido y amplitud del cepstrum), mostró cambios significativos en los valores pre-post aplicación de la técnica. El jitter y armónico/ruido fueron los valores que más contribuyeron en la disminución del IPI. Palabras clave: Análisis acústico; Índices integrados; Masaje laríngeo; Voz. Laryngeal massage technique: acoustic validation through integrated indexes AbstractPrevious research is expanded, having as an objective a different measurement, focusing on what immediate changes occur after the application of the laryngeal massage technique in patients with muscle-tension dysphonia type I and II. The calculation of values of integrated indices of ANAGRAF software was used: Integrated disturbance index (IPI), Articulatory speech precision index (IPA) and the efficient use of energy index. The IPI, linked with both glottal and vocal tract alterations in the glottal source showed significant changes in values pre -post application of the technique. The jitter and harmonic/noise values were the largest contributors in the IPI decrease.