Nuclear pitch accents in the assertive speech prosody of Acapulco, Mexico

Abstract This chapter studies certain aspects of assertive intonation in Acapulco, Mexico, using sociolinguistic interviews from the Corpus oral del español de México . It presents acoustic and phonetic analysis that focuses on the nuclear syllable and considers the type of boundary tone, tonal movement, syllable duration and the position of the tonal peak, while examining the effects of information structure, age, gender and educational level. The results show that information structure and age are significant in the distribution of nuclear pitch accents. The conclusions suggest a retraction pattern of the most prominent tonal configurations and the grouping of the prosody of Acapulco with central Mexican Spanish, although some degree of prosodic residue from the coast can also be observed.