Las características prosódicas del acento en la interlengua húngaro–española

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to discover if there is a prosodic difference in stress production between Spanish-speaking informants and the Spanish of Hungarians. Three prosodic aspects were examined: melody, intensity and duration of the stressed syllables in 300 spontaneous declarative sentences from a corpus by Spanish speakers, contrasted later with another corpus from Hungarian learners of Spanish. It was assumed that Hungarian speakers would perform stressed syllables with less prosodic prominence as compared to native Spanish speakers. The results corroborate the hypothesis, standardized prosodic values associated to stressed syllables are lower in the case of Hungarian learners of Spanish, but the last lexical stress triggers a melodic rise higher than that experienced in the case of Spanish speakers. This divergence from the native prosodic patterns gives the impression of suspended sentences instead of finished utterances, these latter rather being accompanied by a falling final melody in Spanish by default.