Abstract This study examines whether Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals maintain intonational distinctions between their two languages in polar questions (PQs). Earlier work reports both temporal and intonational differences, but temporal contrasts seem restricted to older speakers, and evidence is mixed, with older adults possibly showing greater intonational differences. Using two unilingual discourse completion tasks, this study analyzes whether PQ intonation varies by final stress, language, and speaker generation. Functional Principal Component Analysis of time-series F0 trajectories, combined with linear regression, reveals that the nuclear portion of younger adults’ intonation is more sensitive to the stress pattern of the final word than to the language, while older adults produce more language-specific final contours. Younger speakers resemble other Caribbean Spanish varieties. In contrast, older speakers appear to extend a truncation rule: they produce truncated contours in Spanish PQs and non-truncated contours in Palenquero. These findings suggest uneven maintenance of intonational contrasts across generations, likely reflecting generational change.
Wilmar Lopez-Barrios (Tue,) studied this question.