Producción y percepción de la entonación del español por los sinohablantes: patrones entonativos prototípicos de la declarativa neutra, la interrogativa absoluta neutra y la declarativa con foco estrecho.

Abstract

In foreign language learning, intonation poses a particular challenge for learners (and teachers). The present work takes into account the production and perception of Spanish intonation by Chinese native speakers: in particular, of the prototypical intonation patterns of neutral declarative, neutral absolute interrogative and declarative with narrow focus. By applying the experimental methodology in the fields of production (acoustic analysis) and perception (discrimination experiment), this study aims to identify and analyze the difficulties shown by this group of learners, with the ultimate purpose of improving the teaching-learning process of ELE intonation. To get a better understanding of the context in which Chinese speakers learn Spanish intonation, this work first carries out a contrastive study of intonation system between Spanish and Chinese, which, as is well known, are typologically different languages. Intonation consists of a relevant suprasegmental feature that can be found, with comparable linguistic functions, in both Spanish and Chinese; yet the main difference between these two languages lies in the phonetic realization of intonation. While the Spanish intonation can be observed directly by the change of F0, in Chinese, it is necessary to resort to the pitch range alteration to account for the intonational movement. Throughout this study, the phonological and phonetic description of intonation is based on the Autosegmental-Metric Theory (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Ladd, 2008). For each of the intonation patterns (the neutral declarative, the neutral absolute interrogative and the declarative with narrow focus), a production experiment and a perception experiment are carried out. It is worth highlighting that the results obtained are analyzed from various points of view: 1) by establishing comparisons between native speakers' and students' results, it is possible to locate and characterize the weak and strong points that the students present, so as to provide an overview about their Spanish intonation learning; 2) the collaboration of Chinese learners with different proficiency levels of ELE allows to observe the possible advances in intonation acquisition with the development of general proficiency of the target language; 3) while oral expression and listening comprehension competence are evaluated respectively, results from both aspects are combined in order to discuss whether difficulties exist symmetrically in production and perception; 4) the study also compares the results regarding the phonological and phonetic dimensions of intonation, to explore whether phonetic implementation details of melodic contour are acquired in parallel with categorical phonological patterns. Based on the research results, we reflect further on the factors that may influence the learning of ELE intonation in Chinese learners' context. We propose that linguistic distance between the native language and the target language consists of an internal factor that fundamentally determines the learning and acquisition process, while the didactic instructions that students receive, although it represents an external factor, leaves more direct influences.

Date of Award	2 Jul 2020
Original language	Spanish
Awarding Institution	Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Supervisor	Lourdes Aguilar Cuevas (Director)