Secondary Stress and Stress Clash inSpanish

Research on stress in Spanish has generally assumed that secondary stresses cannot occur on adjacent syllables or adjacent to the syllable bearing primary stress (Navarro Tomas 1972[1918], Stockwell et al. 1956, Harris 1983, Roca 1986). Observation of public speech (a type of discourse where the realization of secondary stress is frequent), however, shows that adjacency in secondary stress placement is not necessarily avoided (Hualde 2007a, 2009). In this paper I test the prohibition against stress-clash experimentally. The results show that placing a secondary stress on the syllable immediately preceding the lexically stressed one is not avoided when no other syllable is available. The presence of adjacent stresses or “stress clash”, however, does not result in “pitch-accent clash”, since the acoustic realization of primary and secondary stress is different. In stress-clash situations there is a single pitch-accent, aligned with the secondarily-stressed syllable, whereas the lexicallystressed syllable has durational prominence. Before considering the details of the experiment, we must start with a review of the different descriptions of secondary stress patterns in Spanish that we find in the literature on this topic.