Abstract
The paper focuses on some of the "foreign" phonetic features of L2 Spanish as spoken by Czechs. It presents a qualitative analysis of L2 Spanish production followed by a perception experiment, in which advanced Spanish-speaking Czech listeners reacted to specifically modified items in non-suggestive contexts.
The most salient phenomena in Spanish pronunciation that cause confusion in Czech speakers include r-sounds /ɾ/ and /r/, the position of word-stress and the realization of vowels between two subsequent lexical items. The study shows that these features, having no relevant equivalents in Czech, seem to be relatively problematic for Czech speakers of Spanish.
The perception experiment, however, did not confirm that differences in these properties would be relevant for Czech speakers, either on the segmental, or the suprasegmental level (the word-stress). On the other hand, it did demonstrate a difference between the perception of Spanish native and non-native speech, significantly slower reaction times and more variability being associated with the L2 Spanish speakers.