Phonology as human behavior

This study compares and contrasts the intonation patterns of Buenos Aires Spanish in normal speech (NS) and pathological speech (PS) (stuttering, dysarthria, acquired hearing impaired, dysphonia and developmental speech disorders) in three age groups equally divided by gender (5–8, 18–50, 51–75) and in three different sentence types: declarative, wh-question and exclamatory. The data were analysed using the Autosegmental-Metrical model and the ToBI system adopted for Argentine Spanish. The results were explained according to the principles of the theory of Phonology as Human Behavior. The results show that both NS and PS maintain the contrastive function of intonation, however, we found the largest difference between both groups in the unmarked declarative sentences and the more marked the sentence the fewer differences were found. Keywords: prosody; Buenos Aires Spanish; normal speech; pathological speech; Phonology as Human Behavior