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.