ProDis: A dialectometric tool for acoustic prosodic data

This paper introduces a new tool that performs dialectometric analysis using prosodic acoustic data. This method differs from previous approaches of prosodic dialectometry in the following aspects: 1) the approach does not need a previous intonational transcription, 2) it considers all prosodic parameters (intonation, duration and intensity), 3) it offers a complete set of transparent statistical tests, 4) it is user-friendly, and fully automatic and the computation does not require a concatenation of scripts and applications. The paper also presents the results obtained using the prosody of several Romance varieties. The correlation among the computed acoustic distances with the distances perceived by human listeners (r = 0.6139, p < .0001) shows the reliability of the approach.