An Initial ToBI Analysis of Costa Rican Spanish Intonation

What is it about?

The considerable advance in current prosodic studies demonstrates the absence of descriptions in certain dialect areas of the American continent, such as the case of spoken Spanish at Central America. Because of this, this paper tries to describe the intonation in Costa Rica’s Spanish based on broad-focus statements, yes-no questions and wh-questions. The sample is comprised of six participants, with a high level of education; a man and a woman for each generation; generation 1, from 20 to 34 years old; generation 2, from 35 to 54 years old; generation 3, 55 years and older. The study is contained within the Autosegmental-Metrical model and the transcription model considerations Sp-ToBI are followed. The measurements are taken with the Praat software (version 6.0.55) and the F0 at the beginning of the utterance is taken as observation unit at the highest tonal inflection of the pretoneme and the syllables that make up the toneme. The results offer the characteristics of the utterances in each modality and their variation according to social variables such as the age and sex of the collaborators. Additionally, this general description of the Costa Rican Spanish enables the comparison with other varieties of American Spanish previously described.

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