Leaving Intonation Behind: The Learning of Syntax-based Meaning by English Speakers Learning Spanish

Sebastian Leal Arenas (Pitt Linguistics)

Spanish and English express focus differently. In Spanish, the focused constituent in narrow-focus structures typically occurs in final position. In English, equivalent meanings are expressed via in-situ focus, phonetically represented by an increase in the duration, intensity and pitch range of the focused element. In a similar fashion, the expression of theticity is also expressed via word-order in Spanish and prosody in English. Second language research shows that English speakers struggle to use syntactic devices to convey meaning even at advanced levels of proficiency. The present study investigates whether direct instruction to elementary Spanish learners on the use of word inversion to express subject-verb focus and thetic-categorical contrasts leads to the adoption of Spanish intonation, and consequently, to the reduction of in-situ prominences. Thirty English learners of Spanish (experimental N=20; control N=10) completed pre- and post-tests in which they answered contextualized questions. Participants were asked to utter complete sentences, consisting of subjects and verbs. Results showed that accuracy improved by 40% in focus statements and by 20% in thetic-categorical sentences in the post-test of the experimental group. Conversely, the control group did not produce syntactic inversion in any test instance. In terms of acoustic correlates to stress, results indicated that only participants who used accurate syntax could reach values closer to monolinguals when uttering sentences in one Intonation Phrase. This suggests that the learning of syntax is conducive to an initial stage in the learning of Spanish sentence melody.