The Intonation of Peruvian Amazonian Spanish Declaratives: An Exploration of Spontaneous Speech

Abstract

The present study explores intonational patterns in spontaneous speech in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS). The data came from 12 monolingual Spanish speakers in the city of Pucallpa, where the Spanish language has historically been in contact with the Amazonian language Shipibo-Konibo. The speakers responded to an open-ended prompt that elicited broad focus declaratives. Acoustic information from 1524 pitch accents was extracted from 194 sentences and analyzed using Praat. The analysis focused on five features: F0 rises, F0 peak alignment, downstepping, final lowering, and cases of stress clash. The results not only supported previous research on this variety that came from read speech tasks (e.g., F0 peaks consistently aligned with the stressed syllable), but also highlighted the importance of using multiple methodologies to gain a more comprehensive understanding of PAS prosody. Specifically, the varied sentence lengths and structures common in spontaneous speech provided new insights into downstepping, final lowering, and stress clash in PAS intonation. Overall, these results contribute to the growing literature on Spanish prosody in shared linguistic spaces and lend support for trends (such as F0 peak alignment) that have been reported in other language contact varieties.