Chapter 5

De la comprensión auditiva a la pronunciación

En este capítulo nos ocupamos tanto del papel de la enseñanza / aprendizaje de la pronunciación a partir de la comprensión auditiva como de la percepción multimodal. Tras el esbozo de unas bases conceptuales sobre la comprensión auditiva y el procesamiento del habla, presentamos brevemente los principales modelos teóricos y los cinco principios de investigación basada en la evidencia que, en nuestra opinión, sustentan un buen diseño curricular de la pronunciación. Finalizamos con una propuesta práctica, ejemplificada en los contrastes de las consonantes líquidas en español, que parte de la percepción: actividades contextualizadas, rentables, significativas y lúdicas, en progresión de lo simple a lo complejo, de lo general a lo particular, teniendo en cuenta el carácter multimodal del habla y su dimensión corporeizada.

In this chapter we will analyze the relationship between listening comprehension and pronunciation. Following the general structure of the volume, we will begin by presenting some basic concepts in this area, such as the tasks and phases in oral speech processing, and in relation to previous research on integrated pronunciation instruction. As for the theoretical basis, some well-known psycholinguistic models will be considered, such as the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; Best, 1995; Best, McRoberts & Goodell, 2001), Speech Learning Model (SLM; Flege, 1995), or the Second Language Linguistic Perception Model (L2LP; Escudero, 2005; van Leussen & Escudero, 2015), which have in common the premise that perception precedes production, both in mother tongue and second language development, and that improving the former leads to significant progress in the latter, as has been empirically demonstrated by several studies (Escudero, 2005; Baese-Berk and Samuel, 2016; Baese-Berk, 2019). Throughout the chapter we will discuss the five principles of evidence-based research that underpin good pronunciation curriculum design (Colantoni, Escudero, Marrero-Aguiar & Steele, 2021): (1) the desirability of focusing instruction on perception, for the reasons mentioned before; (2) the relevance of prosody, as opposed to focusing on segments alone, linked with other levels of the language; (3) the need to use contextualized stimuli, authentic input, natural speech in environments similar to those found outside the classroom, but progressing from the simple to the complex; (4) the selection of elements (sounds, accent, intonation) with high functional load, prioritizing the most frequent contrasts in Spanish, those with more minimal pairs and more morphophonological repercussions; and, finally, 5) the concept of Spanish as the language of many millions of speakers with different varieties, all of them on an equal footing, so that we advocate selecting realizations shared by most of our speech, from a pan-Hispanic perspective. In the last section a specific proposal has been presented that exemplifies the implementation of the above premises, taking into account the multidimensional character of the language and its embodied dimension.