La relevancia de la percepción auditiva en el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras

Resumen

In general, research dealing with the phonetics and phonology of foreign languages (FL) tends to be characterized by the fact that it focuses on information of an articulatory nature as well as it privileges processes associated with sound production in detriment of those that are characteristic of sound perception. However, some of the most serious difficulties for models of FL teaching in which the reproduction of articulatory gestures prevails are closely linked to the fact that they lose sight of part of the phonetic and phonological complexity inherent in linguistic sounds (Maddieson, 2009; Chitoran and Cohn, 2009), as they do not take into account the existence of contrasts based on features that do not have a direct or transparent relationship with specific articulatory gestures, alongside those which are explicitly associated with the articulatory activity or configuration of certain organs. Difficulties associated with this modality of phonological deafness underlie the problems non-native speakers of any language typically have in discriminating some sounds of the foreign languages with which they are in contact in learning contexts (Best, 1994; Flege, 1995) as well as in loan processes (Calabrese, 2009). By way of illustration, we will examine, on the one hand, the difficulties native Chinese speakers have in differentiating Spanish voiced and voiceless stops and, on the other hand, the problems that native Spanish speakers have with French vowels such as the segment /y/.