Teaching Spanish Pronunciation
3. Stress, rhythm and intonation
3.2. Comparing stress in Spanish and English
Activity: The effect of stress in cognates
Make a list of (10-12) cognate words like ENG potato – SP patata, and compare the position of the stress and what effect it has on the vowels and consonants in the word. Your list can be a good starting point for developing an activity in class, or you can ask your students to make such a list.
You can compare your answers with ours in Section 6.
Stress and orthography
The orthographic accent mark should not be confused with stress, that is, prosodic prominence. The aim of the accent rules in Spanish is to unambiguously indicate the position of lexical stress in every Spanish word. It would be very straightforward if every word had an accent mark, however, it would not be a very economical system, so stress is marked only on those words that do not conform to the general pattern. The general pattern is to place stress on the penultimate syllable if the word ends in a vowel, n or s and to stress the final syllable if the word ends in a consonant other than n or s. In this course, we will not deal with orthographic stress in any further detail.
Ideas for exercises
- Ask
your students to find nouns and adjectives that don’t follow the general
pattern with regard to the position of stress (stress on the penultimate
syllable of the word if it ends in a vowel, n
or s; stress on the final syllable if
the word ends in a consonant other than n
or s).
- Ask
your students to make word lists with pairs of words which only differ in the
place of the lexical stress (e.g. bebe
vs. bebé).
- At
higher levels: What’s the difference in the pronunciation and meaning of
phrases like él vino vs. el vino? (Think of grammatical words vs.
content words; words that are never stressed; you might consider here the use
of personal pronouns in Spanish and English.)
- Make a dictation of words with and without accent marks.