The perception of Spanish L2 speech by native users: the impact of intonation

The present study examines how non-native intonation affects the personal traits that native speakers attribute to L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish (whose first language is Swedish). Native Spanish speakers’ judgments are compared to those of Swedish L1 speakers. The evaluated task involves making a restaurant reservation. Results show that Spanish L1 evaluators rate speakers more negatively when assessing non-native speech. A combination of acoustic analysis in terms of prosodic units and pragmatic analysis in terms of speech acts revealed contradictory signals between intended speech acts and acoustic cues in the L2 but not the L1 data. Triangulating these data further shows that a higher proportion of tonal cues misaligned with the corresponding speech acts is associated with an increase in negative traits, such as anger, unpleasantness and arrogance, but only as perceived by the Spanish evaluators. This association is not observed in the Swedish evaluator group, who evaluate their L2-Spanish-speaking countrymen more favourably. The findings suggest that mismatches between tonal cues and intended speech acts play an important role in shaping negative listener evaluations, particularly among the native speakers of Spanish.