The prosody of central Mexican Spanish in the framework of the Project AMPER

The characterization of the prosodic patterns of the different varieties of a language is fundamental in the development of natural language processing tools, the diagnosis of abnormal speech, dialectological classification, and second language
learning, among other applications. This study analyzes the prosodic parameters (intonation, length, and loudness) of the variety of Spanish spoken in central Mexico through recordings of 756 broad-focus statements and information-seeking yes/no questions pronounced by two local informants. The data was analyzed following the methodological guidelines of the project AMPER and the Sp-ToBI notation system, within the Autosegmental-Metric Model framework, to describe the patterns. The results were contrasted with the patterns of other varieties of Spanish spoken in Spain and Latin America through dialectometric tools that allowed the mathematical and statistical quantification of the linguistic distances between them.