Prosodic realization of focus in the discourse of Spanish learners and English native speakers

Resumen

The function of tonic prominence or nuclear pitch accent in an intonation unit is mainly to mark the main burden or focus of the information of an utterance. However, in non-native speech the identification of the utterance focus is not always straightforward, which often obscures the intended pragmatic meaning and the understanding of the message. This study investigates how the tonic prominence is phonetically realized in non-native and English native discourse as one of the major markers of the communicative focus. The results reveal significant differences between the non-native and the English native discourse in the phonetic and phonological realization of the nuclear pitch accent in terms of pitch accent structure and pitch range, which may lead to cross-linguistic inaccuracies.