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

[Scott McGinnis]

-----Original Message-----
From: Eduardo Hernández Chávez [mailto:casandra at unm.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 11:07 AM
To: Scott McGinnis; heritage-list at Glue.umd.edu
Subject: Re: Inquiry: Assistant bilingual Spanish speakers identify
prosodic stress


Scott-
	Stress and length are of course related prosodically. I haven't
seen any study that explicitly links them in Spanish, but I've had some
success informally  by having speakers lengthen the syllables as if they
were repeating the word to someone who didn't hear it or who
misunderstood: "No. Yo vi un relaaampago."
	You've put your finger on the main problem in teaching native
speakers the placement of accent marks. Once they can hear the stress
consistently, the mechanics of accent placement are really very
straightforward. I hope this helps. It certainly isn't foolproof, and it
probably will take several techniques to be successful with all
students.

Eduardo Hernández Chávez
Universidad de Nuevo México

--On Wednesday, October 31, 2001, 10:42 AM -0500 Scott McGinnis
<smcginnis at nflc.org> 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
>