A Comparative Study on Accentual Structure between Spanish Learners of

In this paper, we compare the prosodic structure in Spanish learners of French and in French native speakers. For this, we will consider the accentual structure of both speaker groups during the reading, in French, of the same text in the same conditions. We started by looking at some differences between the Spanish stress system and the French stress system in order to compare Spanish learners’ productions to those of French native speakers. We then considered different variables such as position of stress, number of accentual phrases (AP), number of phonic groups (PG), number of APs per PG, number of syllables per AP, total number of pauses, average duration of pauses, as well as syllable duration. The results show that the Spanish learners’ group does not have any difficulty moving stress to the final syllable of the AP, but they have not yet acquired the delimitative function of stress and the concept of stress group. These results reflect an intermediate stage of their interlanguage in which they have mastered some characteristics of L2 prosody but the outcome is still far from that of native speakers.