The effects of context of learning on the perception of Spanish stress by Japanese speakers

Abstract

This study explores the effect of context of learning on the perception of Spanish lexical stress. Spanish is considered a mixed system (with predictable and unpredictable stress) and a stress-accent language. Tokyo Japanese is a good example of a language without stress, but with pitch-accent. Two groups of Japanese speakers (20 in Bogotá and 25 in Japan) and a control group of 20 Spanish speakers completed a stress identification task, consisting of nine sets of 3 syllable accentual minimal triplets with each having an oxytone (e.g., nabidó), a paroxytone (e.g., nabido), and a proparoxytone (e.g., nábido). The results demonstrated that there was a significant effect of context of learning, with learners in Japan (88%) having a significantly (p=0.000) higher error rate than the learners in Colombia (60%). This study sheds highlights the effect of context of learning on L2 speech learning by demonstrating that immersion can enhance L2 stress perception.