The Scaling of Utterance-initial Pitch Peaks in Puerto Rican Spanish: Evidence for Tonal Preplanning

For this study, an experiment was created to test for the existence of tonal preplanning in Puerto Rican Spanish. The scaling of utterance-initial F0 high peaks was examined as a function of utterance length, which was defined as total utterance duration (in seconds). Eight speakers from Caguas, Puerto Rico, were recorded reading 24 distinct utterances of varying length for analysis. The data revealed that all eight of the subjects began higher in their pitch range as utterance length increased. Results show that tonal preplanning is present and that the lookahead mechanism is being employed. Due to variation within and between speakers and the presence of other tonal contour events such as downstep and upstep, the conclusions accord with recent studies in Romance tonal preplanning that label this phenomenon as soft preplanning (Liberman & Pierrehumbert 1984, Prieto et. al. 2006).