Study of the duration within the framework of the intonation of the most important cities of Colombia

The aim of this paper was to determine and describe the configurations of vowel duration in declarative and interrogative sentences drown from a corpus of laboratory speech from women and men from the most important cities of Colombia (Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla and Ibagué) according to the methodology of the AMPER international project. Data were analysed taking into account the Just Noticeable Differences (JND) between the tonic vowels and their adjacent. Basing on the data, this paper describe the characteristics of the varieties of Spanish spoken in Colombia in relation with linguistic (sentence-type, syntactic structure, syntagma and stress position) and sociolinguistic variables (sex and locality).