Nuclear rises and final rises in Manchego Peninsular Spanish yes/no questions

Abstract

This paper is an experimental investigation examining the tonal structure of yes/no question intonation by speakers of Manchego Peninsular Spanish. It provides a phonetic and phonological analysis of a corpus of 738 yes/no question utterances produced by 16 speakers in a contextualized sentence reading task. The acoustic-phonetic analysis focuses on the scaling and timing correlates of final rises produced under various tonal clash and non-clash contexts. The quantitative results provide evidence for two separate tonal configurations, and this difference is indicated by contrasting nuclear pitch accent specifications: H*…¡H% and L*…H%.