The acquisition of Spanish lexical stress by Korean learners

We investigate the acquisition of Spanish lexical stress by native speakers of Korean. Korean is a language without lexical stress, where rising tone cues prominence at the phrase-level. Spanish, has lexical stress. In a first experiment, we examined the production of pitch correlates of lexical stress. Our Korean participants’ production was similar to that of native Spanish speakers for sentence-final words, but words in sentence-medial position showed a peak typically aligned near the end of the word, regardless of the position of the stressed syllable. This can be seen as a transfer from native Korean intonational patterns. In a second study we tested the perception of stress with minimal pairs in different intonational contexts. Overall, learners’ accuracy was very low, and with a strong bias for penultimate stress. Performance was slightly better in citation forms.