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Hispanic Linguistics at the Crossroads: Theoretical linguistics, language acquisition and language contact
Edited by Rachel Klassen, Juana M. Liceras and Elena Valenzuela
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 4] 2015
► pp. 269–292

Dialect identification and listener attributes

Do you hear la tonada?

| James Madison University

This study investigates the perception of vowel-lengthening, a feature characteristic of the Spanish spoken in Córdoba, Argentina: the tonada cordobesa. Uniquely, the lengthening occurs on the pre-tonic syllable (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1971; Yorio, 1973; Lang, 2010), and is believed to be accompanied by a pitch peak (Fontanella de Weinberg, 1971). The goals of this experiment are to determine if duration alone (i.e. without intonational changes) is a strong enough cue for identifying speakers from Córdoba, and what listener features affect this perception. A matched-guise methodology is employed in which natural and manipulated (pre-tonic vowel duration) tokens are presented to Argentine listeners in a dialect identification task. Results show that longer pre-tonic vowel durations are associated with a Córdoba speaker origin, regardless of the speaker’s true regional origin or other linguistic cues.

Keywords: Argentina, dialect identification, prosody perception, vowel lengthening
Published online: 30 July 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.4.14lan
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