Software-assisted identification of non-native pitch elements for Russian-speaking learners of Spanish

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of an automatic comparative-contrastive analysis of functional elements of intonational contour (anacrusis, first peak, body, nucleus and final inflection) produced by non-native speakers of Spanish, whose first language is Russian. This analysis was carried out with the Plugin for phonetic-phonological analysis in Spanish (PAFe), a software tool for an instant comparative analysis of a non-native speakers’ pronunciation which takes audio recordings as input and implements multiple intonation comparison algorithms between native and non-native speakers of Spanish to calculate the percentage of similarity in intonation production. We used the intersyllabic analysis function of PAFe in order to identify which functional pitch elements of Russian speaking learners of Spanish -male and female- present more tonal deviations. Our results show that most tonal differences occurred in the body of the f 0 contour for female speakers whereas for male speakers the greatest tonal contrast was in the first peak. The obtained data indicate that these pitch elements are potentially challenging for Russian speaking learners of Spanish in their pursuit of acquiring phonetic-phonological competence. In addition, this study allowed us to identify which parameters of PAFe analysis per syllables require further refinement, such as processing of limited intonational spectrum values.