ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

4pSC8. Acoustic phonetic characteristics of internal open juncture by Mexican Spanish readers.

Helen E. Karn

Dept. of Linguist., Georgetown Univ., Washington, DC 20057-1068

Grace H. Yeni-Komshian

Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD

Internal open juncture refers to a set of two or more phrases which contain the same sequence of phonemes, but differ in their prosody, meaning, and orthography. In this study, ten adult native speakers of Mexican Spanish read three sets of phrases. Each set of phrases contained two words and three syllables with the sequence #, #, and #, as in the phrases la sabes ``you know it,'' las aves ``the birds,'' and las sabes ``you know them.'' The phrases were read both in isolation and embedded in sentences (initial, medial, and final positions). Acoustic phonetic measurements were made of: (1) the duration of pauses (when present) between the first orthographic word and the second, (2) the duration of and , and (3) the average duration, fundamental frequency, and amplitude of the first syllable versus the second. Preliminary results suggest that internal open juncture in Mexican Spanish is more salient in phrases read in isolation than embedded in sentence contexts and that pause duration is the most consistent indicator of internal open juncture.