Spanish pronunciation

I will start by framing Kara McBrides article. In it she explores the features of
Spanish pronunciation. Her study was broken down by two categories, judges and
60 first-semester university Spanish students in their thirteenth week of the
semester. She broke down the judges in 5 categories as follows: Group 1 was 40
Mexican college students (ME). These judges spoke English at an advanced level
and had taken at least one phonology class. Group 2 was 107 students from the
same Mexican university (MN) that were considered nave listeners since they did
not possess an advanced level of English. Group 3 was 50 Argentine college
students whose major was in English (AE) spoke English at a high level and had also
taken a class in phonology. Group 4 was 49 students from the same Argentine
university but were not language majors. This group actually self-reported having
low proficiency in English. The last group, 5, were 3 native English speakers who
were Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) instructors at the university of (NES). All
three instructors had taken classes in phonology.
In her study she had the SFL speakers read two verses of the poem Versos
sencillos by Jos Mart. These subjects were exposed to the poem before being
asked to read it by reading it outside of class and in class they listened to a
recording by a native, Latin American Spanish speaker. The students then, while
listening to the audio recorded themselves line by line.
McBrides encouraged to mark the text to help them remember what they heard as
they were instructed to listen to each recording only once. Among the question was
the ease of understanding what the speaker was saying. She also wanted to know
how pleasant was the speakers accent. She also wanted to gain insight from the
judges as to what they thought about the speaker by asking them to write down two
adjectives that describe the speakers. I dont understand the purpose of only
listening to the audio recording just once as she doesnt explain it.
In her data she discovered that the Mexican English major raters were the most
lenient of the group rating higher when compared to the Argentinean English major
raters. She was also interested in finding out if there was an irritating factor about
the speakers way of speaking. Most of the raters did not answer that question,
however, to my surprise Argentinean raters who did answer didnt find anything
pleasant about the SFL learners, meaning that they were more critical of the
pronunciation. The raters who did answer stated that the irritability came from the
students who did ate the letters or who speakers who ran the words together. When
evaluating the factors that contributed to foreignness the most common was the
pronunciation of the vowels. The other were /r/ and /l/ when they appeared next to
each other or another consonant. In her study she found that speakers are judged
differently by the two groups of judges. She also found that those who were
comprehensible were imagined to be attractive, nice people, whereas the others
were found to be have negative characteristics. Argentinians were most critical and
rated their lack of comprehensibility as irritable. The English majors were
significantly more generous in their ratings than their non-expert counterparts.

Interestingly enough some Mexican complained that the /x/ was too strongly
fricative some stating that it was held for two long.
At the conclusion of her study she goes on to say that the implications of bad
pronunciation are attributed to negative personality characteristics. She also notes
that students should be reminded of the importance of good pronunciation.
So my questions are as follows
1. Do you agree with most of the raters when it comes to perception of positive
and negative personality characteristics?
2. What other question would you have included in for the raters?
3. What do you think about her selection of judges? Should they have all come
from one region?
4. Do you think that the students should have been judged in another more
causal setting in order to capture their pronunciation better?

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List aspects of the speakers accent that are good or unproblematic.

What is irritating about the speakers way of speaking?
What is pleasant about the speakers way of speaking?
If the speaker was difficult to understand, what made it difficult?
What about the speakers accent makes him/her sound foreign?
What aspect(s) of the speakers pronunciation need(s) improvement?