Análisis acústico de la transferencia de rasgos del sistema tonal chino al habla en español como lengua extranjera

The aim of this paper is to check if Chinese students of Spanish transfer tone contours from Chinese to Spanish when they speak this language. We carry out our acoustic analysis in the Laboratory of Applied Phonetics at Universitat de Barcelona. Our corpus includes 110 utterances, corresponding to 42 native speakers of Chinese learning Spanish –students of 2nd. year, 3rd. year and 4th. yearat Providence University in Taiwan. The results show that when the Chinese subjects speak Spanish they tend to produce significant melodic oscillations within a number of syllables, predominantly in stressed syllables and in the first peak of the intonation contours. However, what the subjects produce in those Spanish syllables does not usually correspond to a given Chinese toneme of the Chinese tonal system. Quite often, the rise or fall of F0 is either too big or too small to be associated with any Chinese toneme.