‘Cross-language speech perception: lexical stress in Spanish with Italian and Francophone subjects’

The present work analyses the perception of lexical stress in Spanish by Italian and French native speakers, trying to take into account the differences between Italian, French and Spanish stress systems both in perception and in production. We have designed two perception experiments using a similar procedure of other works with native subjects (Llisterri et al., 2005; Alfano, 2006) and non-native subjects (Alfano et al., 2007). Three groups of Italian subjects and two groups of Francophone subjects, divided according to their competence in Spanish, have participated in the experiments performing an identification test. Our results indicate that native language influence is not sufficient to explain the perception process in a foreign language, suggesting that non-native subjects use not only purely “linguistic” perception strategies, since their choices seem to be also determined by psycholinguistic factors and by acoustic properties of the signal.