Phonology
General
While the Spanish and English consonant systems show many similarities, the vowel systems and sentence stress are very different, and these can cause great difficulty for Spanish-speaking learners of English.
European Spanish speakers, in particular, probably find English pronunciation harder than speakers of any other European language.
Some common features of the pronunciation typical of Spanish speakers of English are:
Difficulty in recognising and producing English vowels.
Strong devoicing of final voiced consonants.
Even sentence rhythm, without the typical prominences of English, making understanding difficult for English listeners.
Narrower range of pitch (in European speakers), producing a bored effect.
Vowels
Spanish has five pure vowels and five diphthongs. 日本語と似ていますね｡ Length is not a distinctive feature in Spanish. Consequently, learners find difficulty in differentiating between English vowels, especially where length is a part of the difference. Typically, at least two English vowels share the 'phonetic space' occupied by one Spanish vowel, so one-to-one correspondences are practically impossible.
1. /i:/ and /I/ correspond to Spanish /i/, so seat and sit, sheep and ship, etc. are confused.
2. /ɑ:/, /æ/ and /ʌ/ correspond to Spanish /a/, so words such as cart, cat and cut are confused in perception, though cart as produced by a Spanish speaker usually has an intruded flapped /r/, i.e. /kart/.
3, /ɔ:/ and /ɒ/ correspond to Spanish /o/, so caught and cot, etc. are confused.
4. /u:/ and /ʊ/ correspond to Spanish /u/, so pairs like pool and pull are confused.
5. English /ɜ:/ and /ə/ have no similarity to Spanish vowels. Igi is normally replaced by the strong pronunciation of the written vowel, so /abaut/ for about, etc. /ɜ:/ is replaced by /i/ or /e/ plus flapped /r/, so /birt/ for bird, /bert/ for Bert, etc.
6. As for diphthongs, there are four that are similar in English and Spanish (except that the second element in Spanish tends to be stronger than in English): /aʊ/, /eI/, /aI/ and /ɔI/. These diphthongs are not difficult for Spanish-speaking learners.
English /əʊ/, however, is often not distinguished from /ɔ:/, so coat and caught (as well as cot) are confused, for example.
