Cue weighting differences in perception of Spanish sentence type between native listeners of Chinese and Spanish

Shang, Peizhu; Elvira-García, Wendy

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2022-131

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether variations in utterance-final word stress affect the perception of Spanish intonation by native and non-native listeners. Experimental studies focusing on this issue found that Mandarin learners of Spanish struggled to recognize words with stress on the last syllable compared to those with stress on the penultimate syllable, potentially due to conflicting functions of f0 in the final position of oxytone words [ 35 , 36 ]. Yet this study examined L2 learners’ sensitivity to continuous changes in three acoustic dimensions (f0, duration, and intensity) of intonation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unraveling the contributions of prosodic patterns and individual traits on cross-linguistic perception of Spanish sentence modality

Shang,

Li,

Liang

2024

PLoS ONE

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Cross-linguistic perception is known to be molded by native and second language (L2) experiences. Yet, the role of prosodic patterns and individual characteristics on how speakers of tonal languages perceive L2 Spanish sentence modalities remains relatively underexplored. This study addresses the gap by analyzing the auditory performance of 75 Mandarin speakers with varying levels of Spanish proficiency. The experiment consisted of four parts: the first three collected sociolinguistic profiles and assessed participants’ pragmatic competence and musical abilities. The last part involved an auditory gating task, where participants were asked to identify Spanish broad focus statements and information-seeking yes/no questions with different stress patterns. Results indicated that the shape of intonation contours and the position of the final stressed syllable significantly impact learners’ perceptual accuracy, with effects modulated by utterance length and L2 proficiency. Moreover, individual differences in pragmatic and musical competence were found to refine auditory and cognitive processing in Mandarin learners, thereby influencing their ability to discriminate question-statement contrasts. These findings reveal the complex interplay between prosodic and individual variations in L2 speech perception, providing novel insights into how speakers of tonal languages process intonation in a non-native Romance language like Spanish.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%