Sobre la percepción y adquisición de la entonación española por parte de hablantes nativos de chino

Abstract

Despite the fact that intonation is a crucial constituent of oral communication, and despite its being one of the most difficult elements to acquire in a foreign language, it is, paradoxically enough, one of the most commonly ignored issues in Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) classrooms.

Our research is focused on the particular case of Chinise subjects learning SFL. We are dealing with the intonation of declarative, exclamatory and interrogative sentences separately. We carried out 3 parallel experiments with a total number of 129 subjects: 84 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and 45 native speakers of Spanish and/or Catalan. For the purpose of our study, we classified our Chinese subjects into five levels of SFL: zero, beginner, intermediate, advanced and near-native. As far as the Spanish and Catalan subjects are concerned, their level of Chinese was zero in all cases.

The results of our 3 experiments would seem to suggest that:

• Chinese intonation is on the whole as difficult for native speakers of Spanish and/or Catalan to perceive as Spanish intonation is for native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, although the types of difficulties vary considerably from one language to the other.
• The natural order of acquisition of Spanish intonation by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese is: firstly, declarative sentences (intermediate level); secondly, wh- questions (intermediate level); thirdly, yes/no questions (advanced level); and finally, exclamatory sentences (near-native level).