Utterance-initial F0 movements in the spontaneous speech of Hungarian learners of Spanish

Apart from various pronunciation errors at the segmental level, anomalous stress and intonation patterns are reported to be a salient area of negative transfer in the case of Hungarian learners of Spanish (HLS) [1]. This comparative study deals with utterance-initial melodic traits in the spontaneous declarative utterances of HLS, as contrasted to native Spanish (NS) prosodic patterns. The corpus consists of map task activities: 100 utterances by 16 European Spanish speakers, and 160 utterances by 16 Hungarian informants. The method applied in the research is Cantero Serena’s ‘Prosodic Analysis of Speech’ [2], which represents intonation by objectively comparable standardized melodic curves. In this study, the focus was on the tonal movements from the utterance-first syllable to the first f0 turning point of the sentence, supposing that these would rather rise in the case of NS speakers, as opposed to a fall in the case of HLS. According to the results, Hungarian learners of Spanish do produce utterance-initial syllables followed by a fall rather than a rise as a consequence of presumable negative transfer from their mother tongue, but the native Spanish corpus used for this study is not exclusively characterized by a definite rise from the utterance-first syllable to the first peak either