Lexical Stress in English Pronunciation

Cutler, Anne

doi:10.1002/9781118346952.ch6

Cited by 47 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Reorganizing the data per level (Graph 2), we can see that for the more proficient speakers, the initial position (P3) had the highest scores, and decreases as the expected stress position moves towards the end of the word. That is probably associated with the common stigma that most of the three syllable words in English bear stress in the first syllable (CUTLER; CARTER, 1987;CUTLER, 2015), which is true and justifies the high score density in P3. However, that assumption says that when stress is actually in a different syllable than P3, even N4 speakers ignore the right stress placement.…”

Section: Production Task Scoresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Desvendando a prosódia do sotaque estrangeiro: produção e percepção do acento tônico no inglês por falantes brasileiros / Unraveling foreign accent prosody: production and perception of lexical stress in English by Brazilian Portuguese speakers

Modesto

Barbosa

2019

Rev. Est. Ling.

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many adults who learn a second language have a foreign accent to some extent. The misproduction of lexical stress (LS), which plays an important role in the prosodic structure of speech, contributes to the perception of a heavier foreign accent. Twenty-four Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers of English of four different selfreported levels underwent tests of production and perception of LS. This study aimed to describe how production and perception of lexical stress happen to BP speakers of four different self-reported levels. Acoustic data, as well as the percentage of scores in stress placement, were collected and compared to the production of a native speaker of American English (AmE). Syllable duration, total intensity, and relative intensity were the most important parameters used by the BP speakers to stress syllables. Hits in the perception task were greater than the production task, overall. Initially stressed words had the greatest hits in both production and perception. Overall, the BP speakers from this use, in AmE, the same acoustic parameters used in BP for signaling LS. The production, in regards of acoustic parameters use, gets closer to the native when the proficiency level increases. Cognate words were not relevant in the acoustic parameters choice of the speakers, but they were relevant for the stress position hits.Resumo: muitos adultos aprendizes de uma L2 possuem algum grau de sotaque. Contribui para esse sotaque a não adequada realização do acento tônico (AT), que tem papel preponderante para a estruturação prosódica da fala. 24 falantes do português brasileiro (PB) de quatro níveis autorreferidos de inglês americano (IA) participaram de testes de produção e percepção de AT. Os dados acústicos de produção dos participantes, assim como os escores na marcação da posição acentual foram coletados e comparados com um sujeito nativo. Os parâmetros acústicos de maior relevância para a realização do AT dos falantes do PB foram a duração, intensidade total e intensidade relativa das sílabas acentuadas. Os escores de percepção foram maiores do que os de produção, de modo geral. As palavras com acento inicial foram as que tiveram maior número de acertos tanto na produção quanto na percepção. Os falantes nativos do PB de todos os níveis empregam os mesmos parâmetros acústicos de acentuação da L1 no IA, sendo que estes tendem a se aproximar dos do nativo à medida em que o nível de inglês aumenta. O cognatismo não foi relevante para o uso dos parâmetros acústicos empregados na marcação do acento, mas influenciou os escores da posição acentual. Palavras-chave: sotaque estrangeiro; acento tônico; fonética acústica.

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Section: Production Task Scoresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Desvendando a prosódia do sotaque estrangeiro: produção e percepção do acento tônico no inglês por falantes brasileiros / Unraveling foreign accent prosody: production and perception of lexical stress in English by Brazilian Portuguese speakers

Modesto

Barbosa

2019

Rev. Est. Ling.

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“…Fry, ) as summarized in Table . Length, loudness (Kochanski, Grabe, Coleman, & Rosner, ), and vowel quality (i.e., full vs. reduced; Cutler, ; Fear, Cutler, & Butterfield, ) are the most critical in indicating the presence/absence of stress. This interplay between segments and suprasegmentals, therefore, requires learners to improve their perception/production of vowels to enhance their perception/production of stress.…”

Section: Overview Of the Role Of Stress In Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Variation in stress levels motivated by word category and the tendency for syllable‐initial stress in English (Cutler, ) allows listeners to parse utterances and readers to disambiguate sentences:…”

Section: Overview Of the Role Of Stress In Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

The distress in not stressing and destressing stress in English: Using wordplay to boost awareness, intelligibility, and communicative competence

2018

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Stress is an integral part of conveying meaning in English at not only the level of the word but also the phrase and rhetoric where it is exploited in English in literature, humor, advertising, and more. Simultaneously, stress marks language variation in regional, generational, and ethnic dialects. Thus, stress bears a great functional load and social load in communicative competence. Yet stress is not generally fully addressed in English as a second language courses. Minimal stress pairs such as a record (noun) versus to record (verb), a black board versus a blackboard, to walk the walk, and so on provide, along with other types of wordplay, an optimal method to have learners notice and practice stress. When combined with a systematic teaching approach informed by second language phonology (intelligibility, comprehensive range of pronunciation from metalinguistic awareness to phonological processes, simultaneous focus on both form and function) and pronunciation/language teaching praxis (noticing, form to function practice), using such minimal stress pairs and wordplay can boost awareness more effectively and facilitate acquisition of stress and its extensive role in English, enhancing intelligibility and communicative competence.

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“…Thus, English word stress errors can severely disrupt listener processing. This study uses auditory lexical decision and delayed word identification tasks to test a hypothesized English Word Stress Error Gravity Hierarchy synthesizing previous research that has identified vowel quality (Bond, 1979(Bond, , 1999Bond & Small, 1983;Cutler, 2012Cutler, , 2015 and direction of stress shift (Cutler & Clifton, 1984;Field, 2005) as key predictors for the intelligibility (Munro & Derwing, 1995, 2006 of nonstandard stress pronunciations. Results indicate that English word stress errors, when they introduce concomitant vowel errors, matterand that the intelligibility impact of any particular lexical stress error can indeed be predicted for both L1 and L2 English listeners by this study's English Word Stress Error Gravity Hierarchy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While many languages can be classified as having a spoken lexicon that clearly encourages one particular rhythm-based speech segmentation process (often reflected in a language's preferred poetic structures), this speech segmentation process may in fact involve a cluster of L1 features whose relative importance may vary widely in the degree of payoff they provide as reward for listener attention (Cutler, 2012(Cutler, , 2015. The process of acquiring an L1, therefore, is the process of becoming highly skilled at attending to the cohort of features most efficiently serving perception and production and becoming equally skilled at suppressing the processing of redundant (or L1-defined "meaningless") features regarding which attention would waste processing resources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all word stress errors are created equal: Validating an English Word Stress Error Gravity Hierarchy

Richards¹

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Comparing L1 and L2 English listeners' accurate word identification RT ... Summarizing L1 and L2 English listeners' performance comparisons ......... Do Both Number of Vowel Errors and Direction of Stress Shift Help Predict L1 and L2 English Listeners' Word Stress Error Processing Performance?. Evaluating the impact of number of vowel errors vs. direction of stress shift on listeners' auditory LD accuracy .

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Lexical Stress in English Pronunciation

Cited by 47 publications

References 55 publications

Desvendando a prosódia do sotaque estrangeiro: produção e percepção do acento tônico no inglês por falantes brasileiros / Unraveling foreign accent prosody: production and perception of lexical stress in English by Brazilian Portuguese speakers

Desvendando a prosódia do sotaque estrangeiro: produção e percepção do acento tônico no inglês por falantes brasileiros / Unraveling foreign accent prosody: production and perception of lexical stress in English by Brazilian Portuguese speakers

The distress in not stressing and destressing stress in English: Using wordplay to boost awareness, intelligibility, and communicative competence

Not all word stress errors are created equal: Validating an English Word Stress Error Gravity Hierarchy

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