A Study Of Disyllabic And Trisyllabic Lexical Stress Placement In Chinese Learners Of English

Lexical stress plays an important role in native English speakers’ perceptions and processing of speech(Field 2005, Culter & Clifton 1984). Some researchers found that learners from a non-stress language background including Chinese learners of English may not possess a system of stress in the same way as native speakers do(Archibald 1993, Peperkamp & Dupoux 2002). So far, some researches were conducted to investigate English stress perception and production in Chinese learners of English(Juffs 1990, Archibald 1997, Zhang & Francis 2010). However, little research concerned was devoted to the students both in middle school and college. In addition, little research was focused on both disyllabic words and trisyllabic words.This paper is to investigate the acquisition of the English stress system by second language learners whose native language is of a different type from that of English. To be more specific, the knowledge of English stress patterns acquired by native speakers of Mandarin, which is a tone language, is investigated. The influence of syllabic structure and lexical class on the acquisition of the English stress placement was investigated. Specifically, this thesis addresses the following research questions:1) Do stress makers have influence on learners’ English lexical stress placement?2) Do learners have different stress placement on disyllabic nouns and verbs?3) Do learners have a preference for stress placement of trisyllabic words?According to the questions, three experiments were conducted. The participants were composed of the 20 middle school students and 20 college students. They were native Chinese and had no experience staying in English speaking countries. First, they were asked to produce 20 real English words without and with the stress markers. Half of the words conform to the stress rules, and the rest do not conform to the stress rules. Then, they were asked to produce and give perceptual judgments on 36 nonce words, including 16 trisyllabic non ce words and 20 disyllabic nonce words of varying syllabic structures in noun and verb sentence frames. At last, an English teacher was asked to read the 36 non ce words and record them, and then the participants were asked to listen to them as well as indicate their preference for stress patterns.Results indicated that 1) the accuracy of the words with the stress marker s was much higher than those without the stress marker s. It demonstrated that the participants have the ability to distinguish between the stressed syllable from the unstressed syllable. 2) Results of the production and perception data suggested that disyllabic nouns were more likely to receive initial stress than disyllabic verbs, and syllables with a long vowel attracted stress more often than syllable with a short vowel. 3) For trisyllabic words, the participants strongly preferred stress on the final syllable for CVV CV CVV type. In contrast, for CVV CVV CV structure, the participants showed a strong preference for the penultimate stress. Analysis of the production and perception data indicated that both syllabic structure and lexical class had an effect on stress placement. Analysis of the production and perception data revealed that syllabic structure and lexical class have significant effects on stress placement for Chinese learners of English.