Breve descripción de la duración silábica como señal de frontera sintáctica en tres velocidades de elocución

Abstract

The objective of this investigation is to determine if the syllables that are at syntactic boundary exhibit their location through duration; a nd if this temporal strategy is similar when varying the speech rate. In this work, we cons ider that a syllable is at syntactic boundary when it is at the beginning or at the end of a constituent, minor or major. Our data indicate that, in Spanish, syllables that are at bo undaries announce so by having a longer duration than syllables that are not in this positi on. Therefore, we regard that syllabic duration is one of the prosodic strategies to mark the boundary of a syntactic constituent. We will try to show if the same temporal strategy i s used in all the rates, or if it is different depending on the rate. We under stand by speech rate the time utilized by a speaker to utter a determined amount of phonetic syllables, without including pauses; the more syllables a speaker produces, the faster his speech rate is.