Was That a Question?: Andalusian and Puerto Rican Spanish Listeners and the Perception of Final Fall Terminal Contours (FFTC)

This study examines how variable intonational contours are (mis)interpreted in two different Spanish dialects, Western Andalusian (Henriksen and Amaya 2012) and Puerto Rican Spanish (Armstrong 2010). We seek to investigate how listeners from both dialects interpret the sentence meaning of declaratives, broad focus interrogatives and counter-expectational interrogatives using pitch as the only phonological cue. To do that, two speakers from Puerto Rico and one speaker from Seville, Spain, produced the stimuli for the different perception experiments based on the contours documented in the Interactive Atlas of Spanish Intonation (Prieto and Roseano 2010). An utterance type selection task and a declarative to interrogative continuum judgment task were created from these utterances. Both tasks were presented through the Qualtrics platform to 57 Puerto Rican listeners and 35 Andalusian listeners. The findings indicated that both groups could identify declarative contours as declaratives. Both interrogative types of Puerto Rican contours were consistently identified as interrogatives by the Puerto Ricans listeners. Andalusian listeners were less certain recognizing broad focus interrogatives as a question. Counter-expectational contours were recognized as declaratives by Andalusian listeners. Results indicate that specific intonation patterns can be interpreted differently based on Spanish dialect and may result in the misinterpretation of the utterance.