Order of L2 Acquisition of Prosodic Prominence Patterns: Evidence from L1 Spanish/L2 English Speech

Prosodic transfer is a rich area of research for second language acquisition (SLA), encompassing multiple aspects of a speaker’s production (Archibald 1997, 2006, Goad & White 2006, Gut 2003, Barry 2007, inter alia). In the research reported here we are particularly interested in the L2 acquisition of main sentence prominence or nuclear stress (NS), regarding how the L1 (Spanish) and the L2 (English) differ in important respects. There a few (published) studies on this aspect of SLA prosody, a notable exception being Archibald op.cit. who describes the phrasal stress of one Hungarian adult and one Polish adult learning English, finding evidence of L1 phrasal stress transfer in the speech of both L2 learners. The present research project goes beyond description, aiming to characterize the acquisition process of Spanish native speakers as they move towards native-like prosodic production of English NS placement. This paper makes two contributions: 1) It argues that the distinct timing of the L2 acquisition of different types of prosodic patterns follow from the presence versus absence of competing L1algorithms, providing evidence on the one hand for the existence of prosodic transfer, and on the other hand, for a modular view of NS placement. 2) It presents preliminary evidence from L2 speech that the type of phrasal prominence pattern found in a given language is intricately related to the language’s underlying rhythmic organization: stress-timed rhythm in the case of English and syllabletimed rhythm in the case of Spanish. More precisely, the results suggest that in order to acquire the Germanic NS algorithm, the L2 learner must have moved from a syllable-timed to a stress-timed rhythm. If this rhythm-NS connection is established for L2 speech (a connection that is entirely untaught and unconscious), it would provide strong evidence for the contention that the “language instinct” is still alive in adult SLA (Schwartz 1998). Section 1 details how English and Spanish differ both with regards to main phrasal prominence and rhythmic organization. Section 2 describes the rhythmic differences between syllable and stresstimed languages. Section 3 presents an experiment that speaks to the timing of the L2 acquisition of NS placement. Section 4 presents a second experiment, addressing the issue of the connection between the L2 acquisition of NS and rhythm. Section 5 is a brief conclusion.