Word-level Prosody in Balsas Nahuatl: The Origin, Development, and Acoustic Correlates of Tone in a Stress Accent Language

Abstract Here we investigate the historical origins and acoustic correlates of a hypothesized tonal development in subdialects of the Nahuatl spoken in the Balsas River valley of central Guerrero state in Mexico. We hypothesize that some subdialects have developed high tone on a syllable preceding a syllable with a breathy-voiced coda [ɦ] (