Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech Communication Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain September 30 - October 2, 1991

Analysis of the Spanish Sequence "de" in Content Words and in Function Words in Continuous Speech

Lourdes Aguilar Cuevas, M. Jesus Machuca Ayuso, Gemma Martínez Dauden

Departament de Filologia Espanyola, Laboratori de Fonetica, Facultat de Lletres, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

The aim of this paper is to determine whether the sequence "de" has a different acoustic behaviour when it is a preposition and when it appears as an unstressed syllable of a word. The items analized have been obtained from a sixty minutes recording of speech produced by a male native speaker of Spanish. Broadband spectrograms were made with a MacSpeech Lab II programme in order to analyse the following parameters: consonant duration, vowel duration, CV syllable duration, and vowel formant frequencies. The results suggest that a change in the grammatical function of a given segment implies a change in the acoustic properties of this segment.

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Bibliographic reference.  Aguilar Cuevas, Lourdes / Machuca Ayuso, M. Jesus / Martínez Dauden, Gemma (1991): "Analysis of the Spanish sequence "de" in content words and in function words in continuous speech", In PPoSpSt-1991, paper 007.