The Prosody of Typical and Atypical Speech of Buenos Aires Spanish

Abstract This study examines the prosody of Buenos Aires Spanish in speakers with typical and atypical speech (stuttering, dysarthria, acquired hearing impairment, developmental speech disorder, and dysphonia) in three age groups equally divided for gender (5–8, 18–50, and 51–78). The corpus contained simple declarative sentences, wh-questions, and exclamatory sentences using a repetition task. The data were transcribed using the Autosegmental- Metrical theory (AM) and the ToBI system adapted for Argentine Spanish. The results show an inverse proportion between the difficulty of the sentence and the range of prosodic variation between the typical and atypical speakers: in the simple declarative sentences, the differences were the greatest, followed by the more difficult marked exclamatory sentences, whereas in the most difficult wh-questions the differences appear to be neutralized. The results were explained according to the theory of Phonology as Human Behavior that views language as a compromise in the struggle to achieve maximum communication with minimal effort.