An exploration to the acoustics of focus in the Spanish spoken in Pasto, Colombia

This study explores the acoustics of focus in the Spanish spoken in Pasto, Colombia, specifically emphasizing a narrow focus on subject and object positions. Prior research on subject and object focus in Spanish is scarce (Face, 2001, 2002; Prieto et al., 2018; González et al., 2022). An experimental study was conducted using a contextualized sentence-reading task, and recordings were analyzed for pitch accents, boundary tones, duration, and pitch range following the SpToBI (Aguilar et al., 2024) annotation system. Preliminary results from eight speakers indicate distinct acoustic patterns for marking focus. Focused subjects were characterized by a delayed rising pitch accent (L+>H*), accompanied by increased duration and pitch range. In contrast, focused objects often featured a rising pitch accent (L + H*) aligned with the stressed syllable or were deaccented (L*). Additionally, the verb’s pitch accent played a significant role in focus marking, with falling tones signaling subject focus and rising tones signaling object focus. These findings shed light on the role of intonation in encoding sentence focus and highlight potential dialectal differences in Spanish. Future research could investigate the perceptual and processing implications of these acoustic patterns to deepen our understanding of focus marking mechanisms in speech.