Tonal peaks in the spontaneous speech of vantage level Hungarian learners of Spanish

Abstract

This paper reports on a two-part research project, conducted in order to see how Hungarian learners with at least vantage level of Spanish realize melodic peaks in their Spanish utterances. First, we are focusing on the tonal and distributional characteristics of melodic peaks, taking into consideration the proportion of the rise in f0 with respect to the previous syllable and examining if the affected syllable is lexically stressed. Second, the range of the tonal rise until the first peak of the utterance is analyzed. The method applied in both cases is Cantero Serena’s Prosodic Analysis of Speech (2019), which represents intonation by objectively comparable standardized melodic curves. The differences found in the speech of Hungarian learners as compared to native Spanish speakers have not proved to be significant in the aspects analyzed here. The main finding of the research is that native Spanish speakers tend to realize the first peak of their declarative sentences as the highest f0 point of the utterance, whereas this is less typical in the oral production of Hungarian learners of Spanish.