Response to inquiry: Assisting bilingual Spanish speakers to identify prosodic stress

[Scott McGinnis]

(PLEASE NOTE: Because of limitations in the listserv system at the
University of Maryland, I cannot send Professor Carrera's paper as an
attachment to this posting -- if you would like a copy of that paper,
please let me know and I will forward it directly to you. SM)

Dear Kim and other colleagues:

    I have a forthcoming paper on this very topic which may be of
assistance to those of you struggling with this very difficult topic.
Briefly, the paper summarizes the results of a five session training
session with native speakers where the stressed syllable in Spanish
words was rendered more salient by raising the pitch of this syllable,
lengthening it, and increasing the acoustic energy on the syllable.  The
results indicate that this works quite well with native speakers.

Below is an incomplete citation of the paper:

When Phonological Limitations Compromise Literacy:  A connectionist
approach to enhancing the phonological competence of heritage language
speakers of Spanish. (Jan. 2002).  Research in Second Language Learning.
Vol. 1. Literacy and the Second Language Learner. Greenwich, Ct.
Information Age Publishing.

Best,

María Carreira
Associate Professor of Spanish
California State University, Long Beach

Scott McGinnis wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> Can you recommend activities to help bilingual Spanish speakers
identify
> prosodic stress?   They tell me they "can't hear it" but of course
they
> do produce words with correct stress intonation.
>
> I have had some success by having students repeat the word aloud,
> placing the stress on each syllable & deciding which sounds correct 
> [ex: RElampago, reLAMpago, relamPAgo, relampaGO].  But some of them 
> can identify it only when I read the options aloud to them.
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> Kim Potowski <kpotow1 at uic.edu>
> University of Illinois at Chicago