Phonetic Cues to Stress and Accent in Spanish

The significance of pitch, duration and intensity cues to lexical stress in Spanish was first discussed in 1964 (Contreras 1964, Navarro Tomás 1964). While duration and intensity measurements were easy to correlate with tonic syllables, the challenge was to explain the pitch variation displayed by stressed syllables spoken in different intonational contexts. For example, the stressed syllable “le” in “Malena” has a rising pitch accent in “Malena miraba la luna” (Figure 1). However, in “¿Malena?”, “le” displays a falling pitch accent, and in “Mira la luna – dijo Malena”, “le” shows a flat pitch contour. Yet, the syllable “le” is always perceived as the stressed syllable.