The accentuation in Spanish as Second Language in New York

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the difficulties shown by a series of elementary level students of Spanish as a second language at the University of New York to successfully complete exercises of word accentuation. The article proposes a hypothesis that attempts to explain the reasons for these difficulties based on the idea, already anticipated by Elaine Tarone, that the origin of the problems shown by students whose L1 is English to write accent marks on appropriate syllables is not so much the lack of success when locating the stressed syllable of the word, but it is in fact the very mechanism of identification of the problematic syllables and the action of segmenting words into syllables.