Hakka Dialect Speakers’ Production Of English Lexical Stress: An Acoustic Study

English lexical stress acquisition has always been a popular research topic.The lexical stress of English mainly includes the acoustic characteristics: F0,intensity and duration.The utilization of any of these correlates will affect the output of English word stress.Hakka is a tonal language,and its main acoustic correlate is F0.Based on language transfer theory,L2 learners will be affected by their native language during the learning process.Moreover,there are not many studies on the stress output of English words from the perspective of Hakka speakers now.This thesis measures the acoustic performance of the Hakka dialects in terms of F0,intensity,and duration when they produce English lexical stress,and compares the acoustic performance of native English speakers.This thesis mainly explores the following three research questions:1)Which acoustic correlates(F0,duration,intensity)are used by English and Hakka dialect speakers to indicate English lexical stress?2)What are the differences between the two groups in terms of their use of these correlates(F0,duration,intensity)?3)How does Hakka dialect affect the production of different stress patterns of English lexical stress?Participants were divided into two groups: 10 native English speakers and 10 English learners of Hakka dialect.Each group consists of 5 men and 5 women.The average age of subjects in the United States is 26 years old,and the average age of Chinese English learners is 19 years old,and they are all non-English majors from Hunan University.The experimental material selected 14 pairs of the same form but different accent positions,each of which has a corresponding situation sentence.This experiment was designed based on Lai(2008)research.This article measures the F0,intensity,and duration of vowels in stressed and unstressed syllables,independently.The results of the thesis show that: 1)Hakka speakers and native speakers of English use the three acoustic parameters of F0,intensity and duration when producing English word stress;2)Hakka Speakers use F0 more,while native English speakers use duration and intensity more;3)Hakka speakers use F0 and intensity more in nouns,while utilize duration more in verbs.The above results show that due to the sculpting of the mother tongue,learners of Hakka dialects employ acoustic parameters differently when they produce English word stress compared with native English speakers,which leads to irregular pronunciation of stress.Therefore,teachers can use more acoustic parameters for teaching word stress.