Despite the increasing number of studies in L2 prosody, little research has been carried out on the Chinese-Spanish language pair. This article sets out to examine the L2 acquisition of nuclear contours and pitch implementation details of Spanish spoken by Chinese speakers. To this end, 555 utterances (produced by 37 informants) were analyzed within an autosegmental-metrical framework, and pitch values were evaluated using long-term distributional (LTD) and pitch dynamism quotient (PDQ) measures. The results suggest a hierarchy of difficulties in acquiring the prosodic features of different sentence types. The most salient intonational error made by the Chinese learners was the tendency to replace low nuclear accents with high/rising tones. Furthermore, the higher pitch level, narrower span, and lower F0 variance found for Chinese speakers lend support to previous hypotheses which proposed a general pitch compression pattern for L2 speech. Nevertheless, with increasing proficiency in Spanish, learners appear to develop more target-like intonation contours and pitch profiles. Finally, gender and stress effects as well as other interactions prove that L2 prosody learning is more complex than previously stated, and is influenced not only by the L1 system and oral competence but is also correlated with some psychological and sociocultural factors.

Cross-linguistic studies between intonational languages suggest that there is a universal trend during the L2 learning process regarding pitch and temporal characteristics. We extend these hypotheses to Chinese learners of Peninsular Spanish-a new pairing of tone and non-tone languages. Using six pitch and temporal metrics, we examine how Chinese learners’ pitch and temporal profiles deviated from those of L1 native speakers and explore the factors that may contribute to L2 speech deviations. The Discourse Completion Task was conducted to elicit five question types produced by 37 participants, who were divided into three language groups. Consistent with previous literature, our study shows that Chinese L2 learners had a compression of pitch span (at both the utterance and syllable levels) and pitch variability, as well as a strong reduction of pitch change rate, speech rate, and articulation rate compared to L1 Spanish speakers. Most pitch and temporal deviations in L2 Spanish intonation are closely linked to psychological and cognitive attributes rather than being determined by physiological factors or L1 tonal transfer. Moreover, the lack of prosodic knowledge of the target intonation patterns concerning the different question types may also hinder L2 learners from approaching a native-like pitch and temporal profile.

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