A Study On Stress Deafness Of Chinese Learners Of English

The acquisition of the suprasegmentals—tone and stress, is no easy task but a greatchallenge for second language (L2) learners. Foreign students, affected by the rhythm pattern oftheir mother tongue, may encounter enormous difficulties in learning Chinese tone with strongforeign accent. Likewise, Chinese learners come across many problems during their acquisition ofEnglish stress with Chinese accent. Therefore, this thesis, picking up the stress deafness as a target,tries to elaborate some phonetic issues related to stress.The current research argues after contrastive study of functions between stress and tone thatChinese stress is an accent referring to the perception of prominence of Chinese tone-bearingsyllable(s) applied to pragmatic function based on tone. Since Chinese has accent rather than stress,we may presume that Chinese learners may encounter stress deafness when acquiring English. Thepresent investigation collecting data from stress awareness questionnaire, stress perception andproduction experiments further explores how stress deafness exists for English learners of Chinesethrough softwares such as SPSS, Cool Edit and Praat.The results show that:(1) Chinese learners of English hold a weaker consciousness aboutstress and its references for both English and non-English majors;(2) The Chinese learners canbasically perceive English stress, similar with the performance of native speakers, which agreeswith Altman’s (2006) Stress Typology model (STM) in that languages without stress have nonegative transfer on stress perception of the second language;(3) The Chinese learners encounteran obvious incapability in producing correct stress, which differs significantly from theperformance of native speakers of English.We finally find that the reason why Chinese learners perform a good perception result is dueto the similarities and also ambiguity of stress and tone in acoustic features. Evidence shows theirbad performance in the stress awareness questionnaire and the production experiment that accountfor their stress deafness. For “rather than the question of whether learners can perceive stress or not, the key question is whether learners can employ these acoustic cues in a native way or not”(Montero,2007). The Chinese learners unfortunately employ the ways of pronouncing tone, inparticular the fall tone in Chinese. This thesis will explore some phonetic problems and their causesled by stress deafness in their learning English. The perspective is to help Chinese learners tofacilitate English acquisition so as to promote their overall performance of English.