Shelton, M. 1 , Gerfen, H. J. 2 & Gutiérrez-Palma, N. 3
1 Occidental College, Department of Spanish and French Studies
2 The Penn State University, Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguesse
3 University of Jaen, Department of Psychology
Quantity sensitivity (QS) in Spanish stress has long been polemical. For some, diphthongs are bimoraic, attract stress and reduce the 3-syllable stress window. But diphthongs themselves are problematic. Though Spanish lacks proparoxytones (antepenultimate stress) with either rising (RD) or falling (FD) diphthongs in the penult, (e.g. *[fá.tja.no] *[fá.taj.no]), these diphthong-types do not always pattern together with respect to putative weight equivalence. For example, final RDs regularly fail to attract stress ([fa.mí.lja]), while final FDs systematically pattern as “heavy,” attracting stress ([ka.ráj]).
We focus on the role of penultimate RDs versus FDs in affecting stress placement. Specifically, we employed a pseudoword naming task to provoke errors in monolingual Spanish speakers. If diphthongs do attract stress, then proparoxytones with penult diphthongs (dóvaina) should induce more naming errors than licit controls with monophthongs in the penult (lótaga). More interestingly, if speakers are sensitive to the ambiguous behavior of RDs, we should find fine-grained differences between diphthong types. RDs should pattern as “lighter” than FDs, and thus speakers should make fewer errors naming proparoxytones with penult RDs (pátiaga) than FDs (pátaiga). Our result confirmed these hypotheses. Proparoxytones with penult diphthongs induced more errors (70%) than monophthong proparoxytones (38%). Moreover, RDs induced significantly fewer errors (62%) than FDs (77%). Therefore, traditional binary weight distinction seems to be insufficient to characterize the effect of diphthongs on Spanish stress placement. An explanation based on the internal structure of syllables may be more appropriate.