Percepción del acento léxico en español L2: Un estudio sobre los hablantes nativos de bengalí

Spanish is characterized by a contrastive lexical stress system and its primary stress can be found on any of the last three syllables of the words. Bengali words, unlike Spanish, generally have a fixed stress on the first syllable. Given the differences between these two languages, Spanish free lexical stress appears to be a novel speech feature that the Bengali speaking Spanish learners would need to incorporate in their phonological repertory. This study aims to explore how Bengali speakers identify perceptually Spanish contrastive lexical stress. A stressed syllable identification task was performed by a total of 20 subjects: One half of them were L1 Bengali speakers living under Spanish immersion context, and another half were L1 Spanish speakers. The main findings were that L1 Bengali listeners' stressed syllable identification rate was above the chance level, but below 75% precision criteria, and it was also significantly lower than L1 Spanish subjects. In conclusion, L1 Bengali speaking Spanish learners find difficulty to perceive Spanish contrastive lexical stress and, therefore, specific didactic measures should be taken to help future Bengali speaking Spanish students to learn better this novel suprasegmental speech feature.