Resumen de The role of orthography on vowel lengthening in L2 spanish produced by L1 czech learners

Andrea Peskova, Wendy Elvira García, Trudel Meisenburg

• This paper shows that the native orthography may influence the duration of stressed vowels in L2 speech. Since the acute accent (´) signalizes a long vowel in Czech, but a lexical stress in Spanish, we discovered that Czech learners lengthen orthographically marked vowels in their L2 Spanish. For purposes of the study, we recorded twenty adult learners reading a list with 70 Spanish words. These were controlled for stress position, type of word, and use of orthographic accent. Additionally, we investigated whether stress position has an impact on vowel duration. Considering that Spanish has variable stress and Czech has a fixed stress on the first syllable, we examined durational strategies Czech learners use to produce Spanish non-initial and initial stress. The results show that the learners’ stressed vowels in word-initial position are longer in paroxytones, but shorter in proparoxytones than their stressed vowels in non-initial positions.