The Effects Of Beijing Dialect On The Production Of English Lexical Stress

Acoustically,English lexical stress is of fundamental frequency,duration,intensity and vowel quality.While as a tone language,FO plays an important role in the realization of lexical tones in Beijing dialect.And Beijing dialect demonstrates initial stress pattern.According to the theory of language transfer,native language will affect second language learning.The prosodic differences between English and Beijing dialect may bring difficulties for Beijing dialect speakers in English lexical stress production.However,the research studies on how the native dialect affects the phonetic details of second language(L2)stress production are scarce.The present study aims to address the following three questions:1.Do Beijing dialect speakers produce English lexical stress like native English speakers in terms of F0,duration and intensity?2.What are the differences between Beijing dialect speakers and native English speakers on the use of these acoustic cues?3.How does Beijing dialect affect the production of English lexical stress?This study involved two language groups:one group was composed of 16Beijing dialect speakers;the other group was composed of 16 native English speakers.Each group consisted of 8 male and 8 female.All of them completed an identification task,and they are at similar English proficiency levels.An acoustic study focusing on the implementation of mean F0,duration and intensity in stressed and unstressed vowels in 14 pairs of noun-verb words contrasting in stress location(e.g.DEsert and deSERT)was conducted.The results show:1)Although both Beijing dialect speakers and native English speakers used F0,duration and intensity in English lexical stress production,there is still difference between them on the employment of these acoustic cues.2)The Beijing dialect speakers used FO and intensity to a larger extent in their production of English lexical stress.However,there is no significant difference in the use of intensity.3)There exists r-ending in Beijing dialect which can be marked as longer duration.This can help to explain why Beijing dialect speakers rely on duration to a larger extent than native English speakers.Meanwhile Beijing dialect is a tonal language in which the primary cue is pitch.Influenced by the positive transfer from their native language,they use pitch to a larger extent in their English stress production.The findings of this study confirm the language transfer theory that Beijing dialect will affect Beijing dialect speakers in their English lexical stress production.Therefore,in the English teaching,more attention should be paid to the phonetic details of English lexical stress to help students to produce English lexical stress more accurately.