Core Prosodic Features for the teaching of Spanish prosody to speakers of Swedish

ABSTRACT

Based on previous research, this paper aims to provide the first steps towards a model for the teaching of Spanish prosody to Swedish learners by identifying main prosodic characteristics, referred to as Core Prosodic Features (CPFs), for the teaching of Spanish in a Swedish setting. The study addresses salient prosodic features of L1 Spanish in comparison to L1 Swedish, and discusses whether the Swedish L1 features are likely to be transferred into L2 Spanish. Another central issue of the paper is whether such transfer is likely to interfere with communication. Three Prosodic Core Features are identified: (1) focal-accent location, (2) vowel duration patterns, and (3) prosodic patterns in rising boundary tones.

RESUMEN

El presente trabajo propone establecer una primera etapa en el desarrollo de un modelo para la enseñanza de la prosodia del español a estudiantes suecos, y su principal objetivo es el de identificar una serie de características prosódicas fundamentales —Core Prosodic Features (CPFs)— relevantes para la enseñanza del español en un contexto suecohablante. Debido a su transcendencia comunicativa, es necesario prestar especial atención a todos estos rasgos en la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera. Se identifican tres características: (1) la colocación del acento focal a nivel sintagmático, (2) los patrones de duración vocálica y (3) los patrones prosódicos relativos a los tonos de frontera.

KEYWORDS:

• L2 prosody
• Spanish language teaching
• L2 teaching

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• prosodia en una L2
• enseñanza del español como L2
• didáctica de una L2

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Berit Aronsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9898-0670

Notes

1. These authors compared L1-Swedish, L2-Spanish and L1-Spanish data, produced by ten L2-learners of Spanish and 13 native controls (from Chile).

2. Transfer is defined as “the influence that the learner’s L1 exerts over the acquisition of an L2” (Ellis 1997, 51). The term interference is used when a transferred pattern is likely to have distorting effects on communication.

3. The study by Aronsson (2013) is a comparison of prosodic patterns produced in Spanish L1 and L2 of read and spontaneous data. L1 speakers consisted of (nine) speakers from Spain, Colombia, Argentina and Chile performing read data that were contrasted with Spanish L2 data produced by (nine) Swedish participants whose proficiency level corresponded to CEFR scale B1, intermediate learners. Spontaneous data produced by 12 Chilean speakers was also included and compared with the L2 group. The L2 subjects, aged 19–28, all acquired Spanish in a formal setting.

4. This pattern has been reported also for other (however not all) Hispanic dialects (e.g., Sosa 1999; Prieto and Roseano 2010), such as Chilean (e.g., Román Montes de Oca, Cofré Vergara, and Rosas Aguilar 2008), which is the one used as L1 control variety in Aronsson (2013) and Aronsson and Fant (2014).

5. A stress group is the space between a stressed syllable and all the following unstressed syllables up to the next stressed syllable.

6. Examples 1–7 are adapted from Ortiz Lira (1995, 264) with slight changes.

7. In perceptual experiments, 27 Spanish (Chilean and Peninsular) native speaker judges evaluated spontaneously produced Spanish L2 and L1 data. The data evaluated were recordings of a restaurant booking on the phone, performed by both L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish.