This chapter presents a case of prosodic transfer among Spanish-K’ichee’ (Mayan) bilinguals from two communities in Guatemala: Nahualá and Cantel. Specifically, it analyzes the use of duration to mark contrastive focus in both Spanish and K’ichee’. The results of a production task demonstrate that there is a phonological restriction on the use of a longer duration to mark contrastive focus in Nahualá K’ichee’ but not in Cantel K’ichee’. The surface pattern of this restriction is transferred into the prosodic contrastive focus marking of the Spanish of several bilinguals from Nahualá. However, this prosodic transfer is more likely to occur among Nahualá females and in stress patterns that are present in both languages, i.e., word-final stress.
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