Prosodic proximity and distance from an acoustic point of view between the Canaries and Venezuela

The ties between the Canary Islands and Venezuela, characterised by the continuous migration Canaries-Venezuela-Canaries, is manifested in terms of the linguistic aspects conventionally studied and also in terms of prosody. In this work we analyse the intonation of an ad-hoc corpus of Canarian women and Venezuelan women; furthermore, we consider some results obtained in previous studies. Analyses were performed in a Matlab environment, and absolute values of F0 were normalized into semitones. Their perceptive importance was subsequently determined from a differential threshold of 1.5 semitones. As regards nuclear accents and final tonal threshold, results show that the Canarian curves and those from Aragua (central region of Venezuela) describe an ascending intonation in declarative sentences and highdescendent in interrogative sentences. On the other hand, the varieties from the Canaries and those from Zulia and Barinas are distant from a prosodic perspective, since in these two Venezuelan regions intonation appears to be descendent for both types of sentences.