...
“Special Characters ISSUE: Accent marks in Spanish serve two distinct purposes. One purpose is to assist in the pronunciation of words that do not follow basic stress rules such as, words ending in a vowel, -n, or –s are stressed in the penultimate syllable, e.g., za-pa-to “shoe”. Thus, a word like comí “I ate” requires an accent mark because it is pronounced with stress in the last syllable and this stress pattern violates the basic stress rule of penultimate stress on words ending in vowels. The other purpose of accent marks is to disambiguate words that otherwise are written the same but have different syntactic roles or meanings, e.g., el “the” as definite article vs. él “he” as personal pronoun. Failure to account for lexical stress and 114 Assessing Language Production Using SALT Software grammatical category by not marking accents would negatively impact several SALT measures and reports, especially NDW and the Analyze menu: Standard Word Lists report. SOLUTION: SALT accepts accent characters and considers homophones differentiated by accented letters as distinct words. Thus, words such as que “that” (conjunction) and qué “what” (pronoun; adjective) are counted as different words and are reflected correctly in the Analyze menu: Standard Word Lists report. Figure 7-1 lists some of the most common homophones in Spanish that are distinguished by the accent mark.”
Additional examples of non-accented/accented word pairs in Spanish.
...
-SALT Reference Book, pg. 113-114