Stressing the suprasegmentals: L2 phonetic training of Spanish stress

Second language (L2) learners from first languages (L1) which do not use stress contrastively often face difficulty in perceiving stress in the L2. While English and Spanish both use stress contrastively, L2 Spanish stress is often still difficult to acquire. Spanish stress is realized purely suprasegmentally, whereas suprasegmental cues play a diminished role in English compared to spectral cues, leading to difficulties in L2 acquisition. Phonetic training (PT) is effective for improving the perception of L2 phones but has often focused on segmental or tonal contrasts specifically. This study investigates whether the perception of Spanish stress may be improved through PT. The Automatic Selective Perception model (Strange, 2011) discusses the importance of attention in the learning of L2 sounds, though few studies have examined its role during PT for suprasegmentals. This study investigates this as well, clarifying the role of attentional focus in stress acquisition.60 L2 Spanish learners will receive 4 days of PT, with pre- and post-training performance measured through a sequence recall task, two discrimination tasks, and an identification task. Our results will help clarify whether focusing attention on suprasegmentals is effective in improving stress perception for L1–L2 pairs which feature differing phonetic instantiations of contrastive stress.