The contribution of prosody to foreign accent: A study of Spanish as a foreign language

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The aim of this study is to analyze the contribution of prosody on the perception of foreign accent by Brazilian learners of Spanish. The data were collected from 15 participants and a control group of 5 native Spanish speakers. A perceptual test was performed with two different speech styles (reading and storytelling) and with delexicalized and natural speech. The speech production was judged by 24 native Spanish subjects. First, they had to determine the nationality of the speaker by listening to the delexicalized excerpts in Spanish (storytelling). After that, the listeners used a continuous scale to rate the excerpts (reading and storytelling) for the degree of foreign accent in Spanish. The results suggest that it is possible to identify foreign accent only with the prosodic information provided in the delexicalized stimuli, i.e., f 0 , duration, and overall intensity. In addition, the perceptual test allowed us to assess the degree of foreign accent of each subject while revealing the great variability of their production. Finally, concerning the external data, the following factors predicted foreign accent among the learners: gender, length of residence in Spain, formal language instruction in Brazil, age of arrival in Spain, and reported use of Brazilian Portuguese in Spain. These results confirm the crucial role of naturalistic learning of a foreign language, as shown by previous studies.Keywords: foreign accent; prosody; delexicalization; L2 Spanish; task type. RESUMEN: La contribución de la prosodia al acento extranjero:Un estudio sobre el español como lengua extranjera. -El objetivo de este estudio es analizar la contribución de la prosodia para la percepción del acento extranjero en aprendices brasileños de español. Se recogieron datos de 15 sujetos y un grupo control compuesto por 5 hablantes nativos de español y se realizó un test de percepción a partir de estímulos en dos estilos habla distintos (lectura y narración) y habla delexicalizada y sin modificación. Participaron en el experimento de percepción 24 jueces hablantes nativos de español. Primeramente, tuvieron que determinar la nacionalidad del hablante al escuchar los fragmentos delexicalizados en español (narración). A continuación, los oyentes utilizaron una escala continua para puntuar el acento extranjero en los fragmentos de lectura y narración sin modificación. Los resultados sugieren que es posible identificar el acento extranjero solo con la información prosódica que hay en los estímulos delexicalizados, es decir, la f 0 , la duración y la intensidad global. Además de eso, el test de percepción nos permitió evaluar el grado de acento extranjero de cada sujeto y al mismo tiempo reveló la gran variabilidad de sus producciones. Por fin, respecto a los datos externos, los siguientes factores predijeron el acento extranjero entre los aprendices: género, tiempo de residencia en España, enseñanza formal, edad de llegada al país extranjero y uso del portugués de Brasil en España. Estos resultados confirman la gran importancia del a...

Cross-Linguistic Comparison of the Pitch and Temporal Profiles between L1 and Chinese L2 Speakers of Spanish

“…In the last decades, while there has been a growing body of work on the acquisition of non-native Spanish segments (i.e., Chen, 2007;Cobb & Simonet, 2015;Liu, 2019;Morrison, 2003), stress (i.e., Chen, 2007b;Cortés Moreno, 2005;Kim, 2015;Kimura, Sensui, & Takasawa, 2015), prominence (i.e., Kim, 2016;Van Maastricht, Krahmer, & Swerts, 2016), and intonation contours (i.e., Gabriel & Kireva, 2014;Henriksen, Geeslin, & Willis, 2010;Silva & Barbosa, 2017;Trimble, 2013;Yuan et al, 2019), little is known about the acoustic-phonetic realization of pitch and temporal patterns in L2 Spanish, particularly in environments of language contact between tone and non-tone languages such as Chinese and Spanish. Therefore, the goal of the present study is to fill in the gap by examining cross-linguistic differences of pitch and temporal profiles between first-(L1) and second-language (L2) speakers of Peninsular Spanish.…”

A entoação das perguntas totais de estudantes de espanhol do Rio de Janeiro

“…Ainda que não seja a metodologia habitual empregada para a elaboração de corpus 1 em nossas pesquisas, consideramos que a Análise Melódica da Fala (AMH) 2 é especialmente útil neste caso, já que os falantes não são nativos de espanhol e o acesso à fala espontânea em uma língua adicional é difícil. Entendemos também que o uso de maptask pode ser uma alternativa em pesquisas que trabalhem com outro tipo de fala, como a fala lida (GOMES DA SILVA; REBOLLO; PINTO, 2011;CONCEIÇÃO;BARBOSA, 2017, por exemplo).…”