Prosodic studies in the Canaries: analysis of duration of formal speech in El Hierro and Fuerteventura

The aim of this study is to analyse the relevance of the duration of the tonic vowels compared to the pre-tonic and pos-tonic ones in a formal speech corpus emitted by twelve speakers from two Canary Islands, El Hierro and Fuerteventura. We take into account the intonational mode (declarative vs. interrogative), the type of stress (oxytone, paroxytone, proparoxytone) and its position in the sentence (NP and PP), in addition to the sociolinguistic variables diatopia and gender. The acoustic analysis has been carried out with Matlab. The statistical significance has been determined from the results obtained by means of the application of the t-test for related samples and the perceptual significance was calculated from perceptual threshold of 36%. The statistical and perceptual results, as was expected, do not coincide, for they are more significant from the first perspective.