It returns to the index 

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In the studies on the accent as well as on the intonation, it is necessary to often appeal to the vocalic duration like possible indicator of a pick acentual, or like intonational phenomenon associated to him. So much to accept as to reject these arguments it should have reliable perceptive thresholds, able to establish the discreet limits starting from those which certain you durative differences are audible it is which is their eventual phonological relevance. Since there is certain uncertainty about the value of the perceptible minimum differences in this environment, the present work presents a perceptive experiment on the durational threshold. The most similar methodology to the one applied in the investigation on the tonal threshold for Pamies et alii 2001 has been used. A hundred informants passed a perceptive test. The test contains two-syllabled sequences with vocalic durations gradually variable to equality of the rest of factors (tone, intensity, vocalic timbre and consonantic context), for manipulation with synthesized natural voice. In view of the obtained results we intends a value that can settle down as perceptive threshold of duration and it can be useful in diverse studies of experimental phonetics.

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In this work it is presented the work methodology that we propose to determine the tonal structures automatically detailedly and the variety of tonal structures is presented in declarative and interrogative modality in laboratory speech in Spanish starting from the psichoacoustic threshold of a 1'5 semitones in the mark of the theory AM.

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Pre-Nuclear Tonal Inventories of Spanish Intonation

The present study examined the main pitch accents in Spanish declarative and interrogative sentences. We looked at speech produced under laboratory conditions, as it allowed us to control for the word type according to its stress. Contrary to Sosa’s [8] conclusions that the peaks in declarative utterances are always on post-tonic syllables and the pitch accent is L*+H, our results show that a certain degree of variability of pre-nuclear contours exists, mainly H* and L+H*, in both sentence types. Our results also show that the predominant structure in sentences with paroxytone words is L*+H in the first pitch accent of the sentence, but this structure is less frequent in sentences containing oxytone words. Furthermore, if the sentence consists of several pitch accents, the pitch accent immediately preceding the nuclear tone is normally H*, due to the downstep effect of the sentence.

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This study establishes, in the first place, a general taxonomy of pitch and duration structures – two of the parameters responsible for Spanish prosody – both in declaratives and interrogatives in the pretoneme of sentences produced under laboratory conditions. Secondly, it relates the resulting structures to the position of stress in the sentence, both in the pretoneme and in the toneme. Results are obtained following a rigorous, automatic methodology that we propose. This methodology is based, on the one hand, on the theoretical postulates of the Metrical-Autosegmental Theory (MA) and, on the other, on the selected psychoacoustic thresholds. These indicate that, for pitch, the structure L*+H is not the only one that can be found in the pretoneme (e.g., in the third tonal accent of the sentence, the presence of H* structures is important in accordance with the general downstep of the sentence). As for duration, the commonest structure is G*. In the toneme, syllables present a larger duration than in any other pretonemic position.

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