Tone
Does a word's meaning change when your voice goes higher or lower?
Meaning
In some languages, a word's meaning depends on how the voice rises, falls, or stays level on its syllables. These pitch patterns, called tones, can distinguish words or mark a grammatical difference. Languages may have many such patterns, only a few, or no tone system at all. Tone concerns pitch patterns carried by words or syllables; Stress and intonation concerns which parts stand out and the melody of a whole sentence.
How to spot it
Listen for words or forms with the same consonants and vowels whose meanings differ because of a regular high, low, rising, or falling pitch pattern.
In your native language
English does not use tone to distinguish words or grammatical forms. Pitch helps express questions, emphasis, and attitude through intonation, the melody of a sentence. A different melody can turn You're ready into a check, but it does not give ready a new word meaning.
You're ready.
With a usual falling melody, this is a statement; ready has no fixed word tone.
You're ready?
A rising melody can make the same words a question asking for confirmation.
In your learning language
Spanish has no tone system in which a fixed pitch pattern distinguishes words or grammatical forms. Pitch instead helps signal questions, emphasis, and attitude across a sentence, while word stress identifies the prominent syllable.
Ana viene mañana.
Ana is coming tomorrow.
The statement commonly ends with falling pitch.
¿Ana viene mañana?
Is Ana coming tomorrow?
The same words form a yes-or-no question, whose melody varies across Spanish-speaking regions.
Learners whose language uses tone to distinguish words may treat a change in Spanish sentence melody as a change in word meaning. Learn the word's stress separately from the melody of the statement or question.