Correlating speech rhythm: Evidence from two Peruvian dialects

In a cross-dialect analysis of Spanish language varieties, the intonation features of downstep and declination ought to be considered as two important points of comparison. For a given utterance, a number of peaks may be observed that are associated with stressed syllables. The first peak may be relatively high, near the top of the speaker’s range, while the following peaks tend to each be lower than the previous one. The term downstep is used to describe the successive lowering of pitch at specific tonal events according to position within a pitch contour; declination is considered a time dependent phenomenon in which pitch is lower according to the progression of the phrase along the time-axis (Liberman and Pierrehumbert 1984) (see Figure 1). Downstep may operate over the whole utterance, or over a portion of the utterance. However, the domain of declination is considered to be over the entire utterance.