La relación entre foco y prosodia: análisis de la percepción de las prominencias acentuales en un corpus del español de Buenos Aires

All languages have ways of designate the focus to differentiate it from unmarked patterns. Prosody is an essential tool for the production and perception of focus. The aim of this paper is to analyze the focus identification and its associations with perceived prominence. It was made an experiment with 540 affirmative and interrogative sentences, and with different focal variations (subject, predicate and neutral focus). Seven Spanish speakers defined the sentence modality, the type of focus and the level of prominence for each syllable of the sentence. Results show that all the speakers defined the type of sentence correctly. However, a high percentage of subjects perceived neutral focus utterances as with focus on the predicate. Also it was noted that tonal curves prominence not always correlate with focus production.