Nuclear contours of Spanish statements and questions produced by Mandarin speakers with advanced Spanish Proficiency

Abstract

This study dynamically modeled the nuclear contours of L2 Spanish sentences produced by 16 Mandarin-speaking learners and 9 Spanish natives, using a speech corpus obtained from a discourse completion task. The target sentences included statements (broad focus, categorical, and corrective focus) and yes/no questions (information-seeking, confirmation-seeking, and tag questions). Our results indicate that Chinese students (a) could not produce correct nuclear configurations to differentiate between the categorical statement and corrective focus; (b) produced significantly higher pitch for nuclear pitch accent and lower pitch for unstressed syllables compared to Spanish natives; and (c) may have produced incorrect boundary tones influenced by the lexical stress positions of the nuclear word. The current study contributes empirical evidence to the theory of L2 prosodic learning and highlights the importance of fine-grained phonetic details beyond phonological (dis)similarities between learners’ L1 and L2. Furthermore, given the L2 prosody difficulties observed even among experienced L2 learners, proper prosodic training paradigms are needed in teaching practice. Keywords: Prosody; L2 Spanish; L1 Chinese speakers; Nuclear configuration; Second language