Tonal and duration structures in the intonation of Spanish language by bilingual Americans of Mexican ancestry

We study declarative and interrogative intonation in a speech corpus produced by bilingual women and men from San Antonio de Texas with Mexican ancestry. The work focuses on F0 and duration parameters in order to define the tonal invariants and variants and the duration structures, as well as the relationship between both parameters. Regarding F0, results reveal the presence of fundamental characteristics pertaining to Mexican intonation, particularly in interrogatives, where their end is ascendant as it has been described for Mexican and Spanish. Regarding duration, we have been able to generate different duration structures in the syntagmas we have compared and the different accents over the long base (L) and the brief base (B).