Boundaries and F 0 movements in Spanish

The present paper aims to quantify the fall-rise movements in the F0 curves of a set of Argentine Spanish declarative sentences and the relationship between these movements and the syntactic structure of the sentences. The factors taken into account were: the steepness of the fall-rise movements, the location of the movements in relation to the accented syllables, and the location of the movements in relation to their occurrence in the utterance. Results show that there is a close relationship between the fall-rise movement, possibly signaling a boundary, and the F0 accent subcontours. It is also observed that the magnitude of the movement may be marking the presence of boundaries in degrees. In order to evaluate these results in a systematic way the top reference line was taken into consideration. This criterion proved to be effective for the present data.