Spanish as a Second Language

a Preliminary Study of Brazilian Learners’ Perception of Intonational Contour on Wh- and Yes/ No Questions

Abstract

This pilot study aimed to verify whether Brazilian learners of Spanish as a second language (L2) are able to perceive the difference in the intonation of total and partial interrogatives in Spanish and to examine whether acquisition/exposure time to the target language can influence their perception. Total and partial interrogative utterances in Spanish exhibit movement in the final inflection as their main prosodic property, i. e., it mostly rises in total interrogatives and falls in partial ones. The corpus was collected in five perception tests which were applied to three undergraduate students in Languages (teaching degree in Portuguese/Spanish) who attend the seventh semester and to one who attends the third. Results showed that participants were more successful in discriminating intonation of partial interrogatives from total interrogatives, a fact that is attributed to the influence of L1 on the L2 acquisition process since, in partial interrogatives, the intonation pattern is similar in both languages. As for exposure time to the target language, the student who attends the third semester was found to present slower processing when facing L2 stimuli. In further studies, the number of participants with different levels of Spanish language acquisition will be increased in order to observe more accurately whether, in fact, linguistic processing time is longer in students attending the first semesters of the course and whether the level of comprehension influences perception of prosodic aspects of the Spanish language.