Secuencias de vocales en frontera de palabrasuna propuesta de análisis experimental a partir de datos semi-espontáneos del español peninsular, español mexicano y portugués brasileño

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is a study of vowel sequences at word boundaries in semi-spontaneous data from Peninsular Spanish, Mexican Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Through an analysis of sandhi versus hiatus based on variables such as vowel type, stress, sequence position, coarticulation with adjacent segments, articulation rate, and word type, it is confirmed that some of these variables can affect the behavior of boundary sequences more than others. It is observed that word stress, intonational phrase stress, and sequence position have a greater influence on sequence behavior than vowel type, word type, and coarticulation with adjacent segments. Articulation rates also influence the production of some sandhi/hiatus phenomena, as the probability of sandhi increases as articulation rates rise. Additionally, the effects of sandhi phenomena on vowel duration and coarticulation are analyzed. Duration tends to decrease when sandhi processes are applied in both languages. Regarding coarticulation, monophthongs with elision are highlighted, as they generally tend to eliminate the first vowel and not maintain acoustic features of that vowel in production. On the other hand, diphthong trajectories have a more gradual curvature and present significant differences in most sequences when compared to hiatuses.