Stress patterns and the impression of insecurity were reported to be problematic areas of Hungarian learners of Spanish (HLS) by native Spanish informants. In this study we investigate how prosodic aspects in stress realization can lead to the impression of speaker insecurity in the Spanish oral production of HLS. The study was carried out of 600 utterances by using Cantero's three-dimensional prosodic analysis model (2019), and according to the results, stresses are accompanied by less prosodic prominence in the case of HLS, but phrase accents are realized with a higher rise and a longer duration than in native Spanish.
Former research (Author 2019) showed that in the spontaneous Spanish speech of threshold level Hungarian learners of Spanish (HLS), some of the main aspects that Spanish native speakers least tolerated were inaccurate stress patterns and the sensation of insecurity of HLS. In the present paper I focus primarily on the prosodic realization of word stress in the spontaneous Spanish speech of HLS, and whether it can be responsible for the sensation of insecurity. As a hypothesis, it is expected that HLS produce word stress with less prosodic prominence than native Spanish speakers (NS), as Hungarian stress patterns differs from thos of Spanish, and this may explain why HLS give the impression of insecure speakers. The three-dimensional prosodic model offered by Cantero, the Prosodic Analysis of Speech (2019) was applied, which analyses spontaneous speech by representing the adjacent syllabic intervals as a series of relative pitch, intensity and duration values. The model helps to neglect speaker-dependent characteristics and focuses on objective, comparable data. Our corpus of 600 utterances consists of audio recordings coming from 42 Spanish speakers (300 declarative utterances), and from 30 HLS (again 300 declarative utterances). As for the Spanish competence of Hungarian learners, they all reached level B1 according to the CEFRL. The recordings were extracted either from a Map Task activity (the interviewees had to inform the interviewer about the correct itinerary according to a map) or from spontaneous interviews uploaded to YouTube. This way we were able to guarantee that the recorded speech was spontaneous, and hence suitable for the analysis. The results indicate that HLS effectively tend to produce word stress with less prosodic prominence than NS, but utterance-final rises from the last stressed syllable (phrase accent) are higher and are often accompanied by lengthening. This latter combination itself can be responsible for the sensation of insecurity on the speaker's part, as these phenomena characterize suspended utterances rather than the declarative ones. After defining areas to develop, a further question is how to help Hungarian students to improve the prosodic devices used for expressing insecurity in Spanish in an effective way when no immersion language learning is feasible.
