Hesitation patterns in the Spanish spontaneous speech of Hungarian learners of Spanish

This paper examines what native Spanish speakers find most disturbing in the pronunciation of Hungarian language learners of Spanish. Former research (Baditzné Pálvölgyi, 2019) showed that in spontaneous Spanish speech of at least threshold level Hungarian learners, one of the aspects that Spanish native speakers least tolerated was the way Hungarians hesitated. So the present paper focuses primarily on hesitation phenomena—lengthening and filled pauses—assuming that Hungarians hesitate more, and the lengthened segments are longer than the Spanish ones. In order to validate the hypothesis, an investigation comparing a corpus of Northern Spanish spontaneous speech to another corpus of advanced Hungarian learners of Spanish was conducted.