Acoustic Correlates of the Syllable: Evidence From Spanish

180 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.The aim of this thesis is to provide phonetic evidence that would support the existence of the constituent syllable in phonological theory. The hypothesis is that syllable structure can be identified by examining the temporal dimension of segments. The central idea of this thesis, following work by other authors on other languages, is that the duration of segments reflects their affiliation in the syllable structure in Spanish. In order to test this hypothesis two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, we measured the duration of voiceless stops in relation to the position of the stress and the quality of the surrounding vowels. The results show that in general the consonants measured are longer when stress follows and when the following vowel is a high vowel. Some variation is present. In the second experiment we proposed that a given consonant C will be shorter in a cluster CC than in intervocalic position and that the duration of consonants in Spanish reflects their affiliation in the structure of the syllable. CC sequences will show greater compression (less duration) when both consonants belong to the same syllable. In particular, there is greater compression in stop+liquid sequences (by hypothesis, tautosyllabic) than in liquid+stop sequences (by hypothesis, heterosyllabic). The results will in general support these hypothesis though some variation is present.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD