STUDY OF MALE VOICE INTONATION IN THE WESTERN CANARY ISLANDS

Abstract

This work is part of the project Comparative study of intonation and accent in Spanish border areas (FFI2014-52716-P), which is associated to the Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman (AMPER). The objective of this paper is to undertake a phonetic-phonological study of declarative and interrogative SVO sentences (subject, verb, object) in the formal speech of urban males lacking higher education from the western isles of the Canarian archipelago. The analysis was performed with MATLAB sub-routines (López Bobo, Muñiz Cachón, Díaz Gómez, Corral Blanco, Brezmes Alonso & Alvarellos Pedrero, 2007); a psychoacoustic threshold of 1,5 semitones (Rietveld & Gussenhoven, 1985) was used to quantify the importance of tonal variations. The phonetic-phonological study of the male voice conducted in this work consisted of labelling the pitch accents and boundary tones, as well as their variations, and of comparing the results with others obtained in previous papers focused in the speech of urban females (Dorta, 2013b). From a phonological point of view, the data showed that the initial tonal accent of both modalities is /L+H*/; in the nucleus of declarative sentences, the general pattern is /L+L*/; however, with respect to interrogative sentences, islands may be divided into two different groups due to the presence of two patterns: /H* L%/ vs. /L* H%/.