Percepción y adquisición de la acentuación española en la lectura: el caso de los estudiantes taiwaneses

The aim of this experiment is to study the specific difficulties that Chinese students of Spanish encounter in the perception of Spanish stress in a recorded list of 35 words read by 7 native speakers of Castilian Spanish.
The 120 subjects who participate in the experiment are native speakers of Chinese learning Spanish (different levels) at Providence University in Taiwan. The results would seem to suggest that the type of formal instruction the subjects receive have a positive -albeit moderate- effect on their ability to perceive Spanish stress in a reading mode. The main difficulty lies in the perception of stress on the last syllable of words, whereas the perception of stress on the penult causes the least difficulty.