Perception of lexical stress in Spanish L2 by French speakers

Three experiments on the perception of lexical stress in Spanish (a free-stress language) by speakers of French (a fixed-stress language) are discussed in this chapter. The main goal of these experiments is to further investigate the effect of an ‘accentual filter’ that may lead to a stress ‘deafness’ in native speakers of a fixed-stress language. Taken together, the results of the three experiments lead to the conclusion that French speakers are not only sensitive to the acoustic cues that convey stress prominences in Spanish, but are also able, after a short training, to encode and retrieve the accentual information in a small lexicon of Spanish pseudowords. However, it appears that French listeners do not always rely on the same acoustic cues as the ones used by native Spanish speakers and that their representations of the accentual patterns seem to be less flexible than the native ones.