Spanish lexical stress produced by proficient Mandarin learners of Spanish

Abstract

L2 learners produce the Spanish lexical stress differently from native speakers in various aspects. However, relatively fewer studies have focused on how Mandarin learners of Spanish produce lexical stress and how it influences vowel quality. In this study, ten Mandarin students with advanced Spanish proficiency and six Spanish native speakers completed text-reading and word-reading tasks in Spanish. The results revealed that (a) Mandarin students encoded Spanish lexical stress with pitch contrast more than duration or intensity, which added positive evidence for the phonetic approaches to L2 lexical stress acquisition because only pitch is relevant to Mandarin lexical tones. (b) Moreover, lexical stress enhanced the mouth aperture of /a, o/ for Spanish natives but that of /e, i, o/ for Mandarin students, which suggests that L2 learners still differ from native speakers in speech production, even at a high proficiency level.