Comparative analysis of phonetic difficulties faced by Spanish-speaking learners in mastering Russian articulation and intonation at the initial stage of learning

Abstract

The article examines phonetic difficulties that Spanish-speaking learners encounter at the initial stage of acquiring Russian pronunciation and intonation. The study draws on a contrastive comparison of the two phonological systems, incorporating data on the psychophysiological foundations of speech production and perception. The Russian phonetic system is analyzed as a set of perceptual-motor operations whose acquisition triggers the native-language phonological sieve mechanism, compelling learners to replace unfamiliar oppositions with acoustically similar Spanish realizations and thereby fostering a persistent foreign accent. At the segmental level, the hardness-softness correlation – absent as a systemic feature in Spanish – is shown to be the principal zone of interference: learners resort to articulatory and phonological substitutions of the type consonant + [j] , which impedes the formation of an adequate phonetic image of the word. Divergences in the articulation of front-lingual [t], [d], [n] are discussed – the apico-dental setting of Spanish versus the dorsal configuration of Russian – together with difficulties involving sibilants and affricates that lack equivalents in Spanish and are consequently subject to unification or crude substitutions. With regard to vocalism, the problem of unstressed vowel reduction is explored, stemming from the mismatch between the syllable-timed rhythm of Spanish and the stress-timed rhythm of Russian; the articulatory specificity of [ы] and its confusion with [и], resulting in semantically distinctive errors, is also addressed. At the suprasegmental level, divergences in intonational contours are characterized – particularly in yes/no questions and in differentiating communicative utterance types, where the transfer of the Spanish melodic pattern produces effects of incompleteness, echo questioning, or categoricalness. Separate attention is given to difficulties of connected speech, synaloephe, Russian consonant clusters, and the epenthesis tendency typical of Spanish speakers; the impact of tempo and pausing on the quality of segment realization is analyzed. The conclusion highlights the predictable structure of errors among Spanish-speaking learners and argues for systematic, consciously controlled phonetic work that should be integrated with lexical-grammatical acquisition and aimed at preventing the fossilization of interference phenomena.