Relative syllable duration and pitch alignment in the Spanish of Córdoba, Argentina

In Córdoba Spanish, speech has been hypothesized to consist of wide f0 range and a lengthened pre-tonic syllable in nuclear (phrase-final, accented) position. Proposed correlates of pre-tonic lengthening are analyzed in read and conversational speech, and visual analyses of f0 contours are conducted across both speech styles. In Study 1, speakers recited three repetitions of 40 utterances in which the number of pre-tonic syllables in target words and the prosodic position of those targets were manipulated. Study 2 investigates the same variables in a corpus of informal conversation. The results support many claims made in previous, impressionistic studies: Córdoba Spanish possesses lengthened pre-tonic syllables in which f0 range increases as does lengthening. However, the length discrepancy between the pre-tonic and the tonic vowels is greatest in pre-nuclear rather than nuclear position. This is attributed to phrase-final lengthening of the tonic—but not the pre-tonic—syllable, which provides evidence that lexical stress is at most weakly correlated to duration in this variety. Nuclear accents in read speech were level (L*), but in conversational data they were falling (H+L*), both of which are common to Spanish. However, while the rising prenuclear accents have delayed peaks like many other varieties (L+>H*), they possess a local minimum in the pre-tonic syllable and a gradual ascent through the tonic syllable toward a high tone in the post-tonic. This ‘long rise’ voids the tonic syllable of an f0 critical point and may distinguish Córdoba from other varieties of Spanish.