The Acquisition of English Lexical Stress by Chinese-speaking Learners: An OT Account

Abstract

Lexical stress is an important contributor to foreign accent as well as intelligibility of second language (L2) speech. The present study intends to find out to what extent Chinese-speaking learners whose native language has less evident stress can acquire English lexical stress. A production test was administered to nine advanced Chinese learners of English and nine native English controls, who read aloud 12 types of nonce English nouns. The results showed that the Chinese participants were able to place stress correctly in two-syllable words and three-syllable words with a heavy penultimate syllable. However, irregularity was observed in three-syllable words with a light penultimate syllable, particularly H(eavy)L(ow)L(ow). The results are further interpreted in Optimality Theory. It is argued that the learners' interlanguage grammar is both negatively and positively influenced by their native language. The constraint only active in Chinese causes the interlanguage to be non-nativelike. By contrast, the shared active constraints facilitate learning. Moreover, the emergence of the constraints in the interlanguage grammar which are inactive in Chinese but active in English provides evidence for the learners' ability to restructure their interlanguage phonology.

The Acquisition of English Word Stress by Mandarin EFL Learners

“…They could not use syllabic structure distinction to correctly assign stress on the disyllabic non-words, which demonstrated that they were not sensitive to syllabic structure of English words. Yuan & Cheng (2017) investigated advanced Chinese learners' acquisition of English word stress. They examined the subjects' production of nonce words of two-syllable and three-syllable and found that Chinese learners were able to place stress correctly in two-syllable words and three-syllable words with a heavy penultimate syllable.…”

The influence of Madurese dialect toward students’ English word stress production

“…There are several studies conducted by some researchers like Ma and Tan (2013), Liu (2017), Yuan and Cheng (2017) who revealed the influences of mother tongue in learning L2 pronunciation. Another research done by Weda (2012) investigated stress shifts of English utterances made by Indonesian speakers of English.…”