"Perception of Castilian Spanish Intonation: Implications for Intonational Phonology" presents four perception experiments on the intonation of Castilian Spanish, two dealing with the declarative vs. absolute interrogative distinction and two dealing with the broad focus vs. narrow focus distinction in declaratives. These experiments provide insight into the intonational system of Castilian Spanish that goes beyond what is possible through studies of speech production. For both distinctions investigated, the aim of the experiments is to determine which of the multiple intonational cues lead listeners to perceive sentence type or focus type. The experimental results not only lead to a better understanding of how intonation communicates sentence type and focus type in Castilian Spanish, but also have implications for the phonological analysis of Castilian Spanish intonation as well as for the Autosegmental-Metrical theory of intonational phonology. With respect to the analysis of Castilian Spanish intonation, the experimental results present a challenge to the common analysis that F0 rises that begin near the onset of the stressed syllable, but which differ based on the alignment of the F0 peak, result from two phonologically distinct pitch accents.

With respect to the Autosegmental-Metrical theory of intonational phonology, the results present a challenge to its limited ability to account for linguistically meaningful distinctions in pitch scaling beyond the High vs. Low tone distinction and also for the often assumed compositional approach to intonational meaning. For each of these challenges, a new proposal is offered to more adequately account for the data.

Timothy L. Face is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on phonetics and experimental phonology, and especially on Spanish prosody. He has published extensively on Castilian Spanish intonation, including two previous books, Intonational Marking of Contrastive Focus in Madrid Spanish (2002) and The Intonation of Castilian Spanish Declaratives and Absolute Interrogatives (2008). In addition, he is author of Guide to the Phonetic Symbols of Spanish (2008), editor of Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology (2004) and founding editor of the journal Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics.