On the diphthong/hiatus contrast in Spanish: some experimental results

Abstract

Some Spanish dialects have a lexical contrast between sequences in hiatus and diphthongs. Thus, whereas, for instance, dueto 'duet' admits a trisyllabic pronunciation with the sequence ue realized in hiatus [du.é.to], the word duelo 'sorrow' can only be pronounced as bisyllabic [dwé.lo]. Similarly, [pi.é] 'I chirped' contrasts with [pjé] 'foot' in this manner. The interest of this phenomenon lies in the fact that it represents a clear case of phonological contrasts between hiatus and diphthong or, in other terms, between high vowels and glides.What remains largely unknown is the dialectal extension of this contrast and how consistently specific items are classified as belonging to either the hiatus or the diphthong class within a given dialect or across dialects. In this paper we report on an experiment designed to test the consistency of the distinction in Madrid Spanish, as a first step in the crossdialectal investigation of the phenomenon. We measured the duration of the sequence ia in a group of test words inserted in a uniform carrier sentence. The results show that for all six speakers tested, the hypothesized hiatus and diphthong classes present different durational distributions, the sequence ia tending to be longer in hiatus-class words, although there is a certain amount of overlap between the groups and some variation.

Using Functional Data Analysis for investigating multidimensional dynamic phonetic contrasts

“…(3). The predicted duration of D is 133 ms, while for H this is 181 ms, which is in line with the findings in Aguilar (1999) and in Hualde and Prieto (2002). The difference between the means is highly significant and class (i.e.…”

“…More recently, analyzed the alignment of rising pitch accents in Spanish segmental sequences involving a similar gestural content but differing in syllabic structure, including the diphthongs and hiatuses investigated in the present study. In agreement with the syllabification patterns proposed by Hualde and Prieto (2002), it was found that rising pitch accents in /ia/ hiatuses were aligned with the second vowel of the sequence, while in diphthongs, the start of rising accents was aligned earlier, presumably at the onset of the syllable containing the diphthong. Since the onset of rising pitch accents in Spanish have been reported to be aligned with the beginning of lexically stressed syllables (Prieto, van Santen, & Hirschberg, 1995;Prieto & Torreira, 2007), this study concluded that the differences in f 0 alignment must be due to differences in syllabification of /ia/ vowel sequences (i.e.…”

“…It was found that hiatuses have a longer average duration and a greater degree of curvature in the F 2 trajectory than diphthongs, both in conversational and in read speech. Hualde and Prieto (2002) investigated the D/H contrast by asking Madrid Spanish speakers to syllabify and read series of words containing the vowel sequence ia and by measuring the duration of the produced vowel sequences. They found that, as reported in Aguilar (1999), speakers produced longer vowel sequences in cases categorised as hiatuses than in those categorised as diphthongs.…”

“…linear regression, principal component analysis) to dynamic features by representing them as continuous functions, and that this can be done for multiple features in a single joint analysis. To illustrate this, we revisit the diphthong-hiatus distinction in Spanish, a contrast in which several phonetic features have been implicated (duration, formant trajectories, f 0 alignment, see Aguilar, 1999;Hualde & Prieto, 2002;. In particular, we show how FDA can be used to reveal the trading relations between these features, and, more specifically, how different speakers trade the features in different ways.…”

RP English and Castilian Spanish Diphthongs Revisited from the Beats-and-Binding Perspective

“…For example, Hualde and Prieto (2002) established that the acoustic difference between Spanish diphthongs and hiatuses lies in the mean duration values of the two vocoids. Cabré and Prieto (2004) provide a broad empirical study of the present-day lexical distribution of the rising diphthong/hiatus alternations in Central Catalan and represent the results in the form of OTed tableaux.…”