The relevance of prosodic structure in tonal articulation Edge effects at the prosodic word level in Catalan and Spanish

A production experiment with 1600 potentially ambiguous utterances distinguished by word boundary location in Catalan and Spanish (e.g., Cat. mirà batalles ‘(s)he looked at battles’ vs. mirava talles ‘I/(s)he used to look at carvings’; Span. da balazos ‘(s)he fires shots’ vs. daba lazos ‘I/(s)he gave ribbons’; stressed syllables are underlined) was undertaken. Results revealed strong (and statistically significant) effects of within-word position on H location, in such a way that peaks tended to be timed earlier when their associated syllables occurred later in the word than when they occurred earlier in the word, confirming previous results for other languages (Silverman & Pierrehumbert 1990 for English; Arvaniti et al. 1998 for Greek; and Ishihara 2006 for Japanese; Godjevac 2000 for Serbo-Croatian) and for Spanish and Catalan (Prieto et al. 1995 for Spanish; de la Mota 2005, Simonet 2006, Simonet & Torreira 2005 for Catalan). In the light of these results, the production experiment was followed up by a set of perception experiments with the goal of determining whether listeners are able to use H alignment information for lexical access. The results of these latter experiments supported the hypothesis that Catalan and Spanish listeners are able to employ fine allophonic details of H tonal alignment due to within-word position to identify lexical items that are ambiguous for word-boundary position. The empirical evidence discussed in this paper contributes to our understanding of the temporal organization of tonal gestures and their patterns of coordination with segments. The data advocates a view in which prosodic structure plays an essential part in our understanding of the coordination of pitch gestures with the segments.