Análisis acústico de la producción de la entonación española por parte de sinohablantes

The aims of this paper are: (1) to characterize the intonation contours produced by Chinese students of Spanish, when they speak this language, and (2) to check if they transfer intonation contours from Chinese to Spanish. We carry out our acoustic analysis in the Laboratory of Applied Phonetics at Universitat de Barcelona. Our corpus includes 120 interviews to 98 native speakers of Chinese learning Spanish at Providence University in Taiwan. We listen to the recordings and select 110 utterances with different types of intonation -declarative, exclamatory and interrogative-, corresponding to 42 students of three different levels (school years)-. The results would seem to suggest that Chinese students do transfer intonation contours from Chinese to Spanish, that is to say, they make use of intonation contours existing in their native language when they speak Spanish. The main difficulty for them lies in the production of exclamatory intonation, which is the most complex in Spanish (and in Chinese, too). The type of formal instruction the subjects receive does not improve their intonation competence in (semi)-spontaneous speech.