Presentation

Mexican & Chicano Spanish Prosody: Differences Related to Information Structure

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Abstract

This study addresses the intonational encoding of new and given information by monolingual Mexican speakers of Spanish and Spanish/English Chicano heritage speakers. Spanish is a so-called non-plastic language, which tends to encode novel information in a speech signal with word order. Meanwhile, English is known as a plastic language, which uses pitch excursions to signal new information. This study compares the acoustic correlates of information structure in a naturalistic corpus of semi-directed interviews in order to evaluate dialectal variation in the prosodic encoding of new information. It was hypothesized that bilingual speakers would use more pitch excursions for new information due to the fact that they also speak a plastic language, namely English. The results conclude that bilingual Chicano speakers do in fact use more plastic, or English-like, pitch excursions to encode new information, as compared to the monolingual speakers. This study is novel in its use of naturalistic language, rather than experimental tasks in examining information structure and in its use of a mixed-effects model to verify the results.

How to Cite:

Harris, M. J., Miglio, V. G. & Gries, S. T., (2014) “Mexican & Chicano Spanish Prosody: Differences Related to Information Structure”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 6(1).