Wh-questions in Spanish: Meanings and Configuration Variability

Beyond “Naturalistic”: On the Role of Task Characteristics and the Importance of Multiple Elicitation Methods

“…Research on native intonation patterns for pronominal interrogatives has shown that although it may have once been thought that NSs produce final rises to signal this utterance type, there is actually considerable variation across studies (Face 2003, Henriksen 2009, O'Rourke 2005, Sosa 2003and Willis 2003. This difference has been attributed to geographic variation and, more recently, to variation across tasks.…”

Syllable structure and word stress effects in Peninsular Spanish nuclear accents

“…For Peninsular Spanish, there is a history of research on the intonational patterns of speakers from the northern and central areas of Spain (e.g., Face 2002, Face 2008, Face 2011Prieto 2004;Estebas-Vilaplana and Prieto 2010), but the extent of intonational variation throughout the peninsula is not completely known. For Spanish generally, boundary falls are widely observed in wh-question intonation (Navarro Tomás 1944;Sosa 1999;Dorta Luis 2000;Sosa 2003;Prieto 2004;Henriksen 2009;Armstrong 2010; Willis 2010, among others), but detailed phonetic accounts with phonological implications are scarce. Prieto (2004) examined the speech data of two speakers from northern Spain and found that the most frequent contour contained a low-rise configuration (L*H%), although one speaker occasionally produced a contour comprised of a nuclear fall (H þ L* L%).…”

Wh-question intonation in Peninsular Spanish: Multiple contours and the effect of task type

“…Within the Hispanic tradition, research in intonation has traditionally relied on the analysis of multiple repetitions of a set of prepared utterances under some variation of a sentence reading task. While some studies include context-based discourse prompts (e.g., Face, 2002;O'Rourke, 2005;Willis, 2005Willis, , 2006Alvord, 2007), others do not (e.g., Prieto, van Santen, & Hirschberg, 1995;Sosa, 2003;Prieto, 2004;Simonet, 2008 for declaratives). Face (2003) compared declarative tonal patterns known from previous research on laboratory speech with those produced in spontaneous speech.…”

“…Thus, the use of multiple tasks may serve to elicit a broader range of tonal patterns. Second, current research offers contradictory reports on the reliability of read aloud data as a reflection of naturalistic speech patterns (Face, 2003;Sosa, 2003;Lickley et al, 2005;Cruttenden, 2007). Ladd (1996), in his work on intonational phonology and autosegmentalmetrical theory, observes two cross-linguistic tendencies in the intonational marking of wh-questions.…”

“…Although Navarro Tomás (1944), Quilis (1993), Sosa (2003), and Hualde (2005) contend that the default configuration is comprised of a descending contour, acoustic analysis of multiple native speaker productions elicited within an experimental framework is limited. Prieto (2004), which is perhaps the only laboratory study to analyze multiple Peninsular Spanish speaker productions, offers no evidence for the global falling contour, but attests the use of a final rise contour and a second contour marked by a nuclear fall.…”