The Acquisition of the Phrase Accentby Beginning Adult Learners of Spanish as a Second Language

The acquisition of intonation by adult learners is one of the least explored areas of second language acquisition (SLA) research. While some studies have been carried out on the L2 acquisition of French intonation (cf. Ramsey 1997, Konopczynski 1998), few studies seem to exist on the acquisition of Spanish intonation by adult learners. Elliott (2003), for example, in a recent review of the literature on the SLA of Spanish phonology, makes no mention of empirical research on the acquisition of intonation, although there have been various studies on the acquisition of individual Spanish sounds (e.g., Zampini 1994, 1998a, 1998b, Elliott 1997, and González-Bueno 1997, to name a few). This paucity of SLA research on Spanish intonation is in part due to the less transparent nature of the structure and meaning of intonation in general (as opposed to the structure of the segment or the syllable, for example). Recently, substantial progress has been made in understanding the phonology of Spanish intonation within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) model. Some studies include Sosa (1991, 1999), Prieto et al. (1995, 1996), Nibert (1999, 2000), Face (2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c), Hualde (2002), Beckman et al. (2002), Díaz-Campos and McGory (2002), and McGory and DíazCampos (2002). As the structure, meaning, and phonetic implementation of tonal categories in the language are elucidated, progress in SLA research on Spanish intonation can follow. A recent study, namely Nibert (2005), examined the acquisition of one particular tonal category in Spanish by intermediate and advanced adult learners of the language who speak English as an L1. This tonal category, the phrase accent (T-), which may be high (H-) or low (L-), is employed in utterance-medial position in both English and Spanish to clarify meaning in utterances containing syntactic and semantic ambiguities (cf. for English, Pierrehumbert 1980, Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986, Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988, and Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990; for Spanish, Nibert 1999, 2000 and Hualde 2002). More specifically, in both languages, there are two hierarchical levels of phonological phrasing beyond the level of the prosodic word, namely, the intermediate phrase and the intonation phrase. An intermediate phrase minimally contains one pitch accent (T*) and is delimited by a phrase accent (T-) at its right edge (i.e., [T* T-]). An intonation phrase minimally contains one intermediate phrase and is marked by a boundary tone (T%) at its right edge (i.e.,[[T* T-] T%]). These two distinct levels of phrasing may be exploited to create meaning contrasts. For example, the Spanish utterance [[lilas y lirios amarillos]L-]L%, realized with one intermediate phrase, conveys the meaning ‘yellow lilies and irises,’ where both flower types are yellow. In contrast, the utterance [[lilas]H[y lirios amarillos]L-]L%, with two intermediate phrases, provokes the reading ‘lilies and yellow irises,’ where only the irises are specified for color. Figure (1) illustrates the intonation structure underlying this second meaning within the AM framework, where elements on the