Japanese learners of Spanish sometimes fail to perceive the stresses when listening to Spanish utterances. Results of a perceptual experiment with 270 stimuli and 64 informants (43 Spanish and 21 Japanese) reveal that Spanish speakers perceive the stresses correctly almost every time, whereas Japanese speakers tend to fail to do so when the word is pronounced with rising intonation. The cause of this is the difference in phonetic realizations of Spanish stresses and those of Japanese accents. Japanese learners should be taught that the Spanish stressed with a high pitch.
Cite as: Kimura, T., Sensui, H., Takasawa, M., Toyomaru, A., Atria, J.J. (2010) A pilot study on perception of Spanish stress by Japanese learners of Spanish. Proc. Second Language Studies: Acquisition, Learning, Education and Technology (L2WS 2010), paper O1-4
@inproceedings{kimura10_l2ws,
author={Takuya Kimura and Hirotaka Sensui and Miyuki Takasawa and Atsuko Toyomaru and José Joaquín Atria},
title={{A pilot study on perception of Spanish stress by Japanese learners of Spanish}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Second Language Studies: Acquisition, Learning, Education and Technology (L2WS 2010)},
pages={paper O1-4}
}