Durational Categorization and Prosodic Distance in the Spanish of the Canary Islands

The present work studies the importance of the duration in the prosody of Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands. This study covers a double perspective: the acoustic analysis has allowed to check what factors determine perceptually significant differences between the tonic vowels and their adjacent, while the dialectometric analysis has distributed the data to verify the impact of the duration on the distance or proximity between the different islands considered. This corpus consists of 756 declarative and interrogative sentences with an SVO structure and has been issued by fourteen Canarian informants: seven women and seven men from the islands’ capital areas, without higher studies.