DEFENSA DE TESIS MAGÍSTER EN LINGÜÍSTICA APLICADA

Titulo:“PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH NUCLEAR ACCENT PLACEMENT BY L2 LEARNERS: THE ROLE OF WORKING MEMORY AND PROFICIENCY”.

Candidata: Srta. CONSTANZA RIQUELME FIGUEROA.

Profesora Guía: Dra. Yasna Pereira Reyes.

Profesor Co-Guía: Dr. Mauricio Véliz Campos.

Fecha defensa: viernes 4 de abril, a las 15.00 hrs., en la Sala Max Echeverría, 3er piso, Facultad de Humanidades y Arte.

Abstract

Prosody is widely recognized as one of the most challenging aspects of second language (L2) speech acquisition (del Saz & Grau, 2022). This study seeks to determine the role of proficiency and working memory (WM) in the perception and production of English nuclear accent (NA) by L1 Spanish learners. Specifically, the study examines both the default patterns of NA placement and exceptions to these rules. To this end, participants completed perception and production tests, together with a proficiency test and a reading span test to measure WM. The study employed 24 university participants from the English teacher education programme from a university based in Concepción-Chile, all of whom had previously completed an English intonation course.

Results indicated that learners perceived default patterns more accurately, while their production of non-default patterns showed better performance. This suggests an asymmetry between perception and production, as no direct relationship between these two skills was observed. Proficiency showed weak positive correlations with most variables. WM, however, exhibited weak negative correlations across several measures of perception and production of NA. While subtle, these trends suggest that higher working memory capacity may not necessarily facilitate perception and production performance in this context, although further research is required.