Las características acústicas y perceptivas del acento léxico en español y en italiano: los patrones acentuales paroxítonos

In this paper we examine acoustic and perceptual characteristics of lexical stress in Italian and Spanish by native and non-native speakers. In spite of several similarities between the two languages, there are relevant differences in the way lexical stress is perceived by native speakers of these languages, in relation to its acoustic correlates (i.e., f0 and duration). Experiments with non native language stimuli reveal that Spanish and Italian subjects respond to manipulation of acoustic parameters with a significant differences between oxytone and paroxytone words. We argue that differences of acoustic duration between Spanish and Italian stressed vowels could be considered a reason for a not clear perceptual behaviour with oxytone words: in particular, Spanish subjects are somehow unable to solve a sort of conflict between the acoustic stimuli (Italian short final stressed vowels), and their L1 expectations (long final stressed vowels). On the other hand, the greater perceptual sensitivity to the manipulations of acoustic parameters of paroxytone words seems to lie in their higher frequency in the lexicon of the two languages, that may bias the processing of words towards the more common/less marked stress pattern