Spanish exhibits processes of resyllabification that provoke misalignments between word boundaries and syllabic structure. That happens when word-initial vowels are re-grouped with the end of the previous word (e.g. mis amigos ‘my friends’ is syllabified mi.sa.mi.gos).
This misalignment poses serious difficulties to students of Spanish as a second language when it comes to processing someone else’s speech, because it may take them too long to segment the continuum into words.
Several experiments were conducted, as a first step, to determine the acoustic cues that native listeners of Spanish rely on when they have to identify the word boundary in ambiguous resyllabification contexts. Ideally, these cues could be included in a program of auditory training for L2-Spanish students.

Presented by:

José María Lahoz-Bengoechea,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)