A Study On The Perception And Production Of Word Stress By English Majors In A Vocational College

English is a stress language,in which stress plays a significant role.Chinese,however,is a typical tone language with no strong pattern of word-level stress.It has been found that English learners of tone languages like Chinese face problems in English word stress acquisition which are assumed to rise from L1 transfer.Stress,however,as a suprasegmental feature,is essential for efficient communication,and misplacement of word stress is a common cause of misunderstanding.Therefore,more attention should be paid to the perception and production of English word stress.Besides,in English stressed syllables are usually produced with relatively higher pitch,longer duration and greater intensity than unstressed syllables.Though some Chinese ESL learners can place the word stress correctly,they still cannot employ the above three acoustic cues of stress to a native-like degree.Incorrect use of acoustic cues to differentiate stressed syllables from unstressed ones could cause unnatural production of English lexical stress and then cause non-native accent,which also leads to misunderstanding in communication.Therefore,it is also necessary to investigate the phonetic realization of stress,so that to find out problems and the underlying reasons,then further shedding light on English pronunciation teaching.The current study was conducted among 31 English majors from a vocational college.Two tasks were included,stress perception task and stress production task,which aim to figure out the participants’ performance on word stress perception and production,and also the misperception and misplacement tendency among English majors in the vocational college.Based on the former analysis,the employment of the three acoustic cues of word stress was investigated and compared with English native speakers.Hence,three research questions below are addressed in this thesis:(1)How’s the performance of those English majors in the vocational college in word stress perception? What about the misperception tendency?(2)How’s the performance in word stress production? What about the misplacement tendency?(3)In word stress production,have English majors in the vocational college employed the three acoustic cues(pitch,duration,intensity)to achieve correct stress placement? If yes,to what degree?The results reveal that:(1)Most English majors in the vocational college have acquired a basic ability of stress perception,but some still feel challenging to correctly perceive the word stress,inferring that more training is needed to help the participants reach a higher level.Then,a detailed analysis shows that the participants have a better performance in perceiving the stress of four-syllable words than two and three-syllable words.As to stress patterns,words with stress on the second syllable have obtained the lowest error rate,showing a preference to the stress pattern of S2.Besides,it is also found that most errors committed by the participants are due to the misperception tendency of left-shift.(2)Concerning the stress production,English majors have obtained a high average accuracy rate of 90.3%,indicating that they are at a high level of stress production competence when producing words they are familiar with.However,it is also found that the participants have unexpectedly got high error rates for two words they have already learned,that is,“interviewee” and “interesting” due to certain reasons.Additionally,it is illustrated that the error rate of four-syllable words turns out to be the lowest when compared with two and three-syllable words.Therefore,the participants are reported to have a preference for four-syllable words in stress production,but no preference for a certain kind of stress pattern has been found.Moreover,the misplacement tendency is verified to be left-shift,which is the same as the misperception tendency.(3)Finally,the investigation of phonetic realization of word stress has proved that those English majors do employ the three acoustic cues,pitch,duration and intensity to achieve correct stress placement,though the degree of employment differs from English native speakers.A significant difference has been found in the degree of employment of pitch,showing that the participants’ employment degree of pitch is significantly lower than that of English native speakers.However,no significant difference has been found in duration and intensity.The degree of employment of duration tends to be a little bit lower than native speakers.Only for intensity,the participants are able to successfully approximate native-like patterns of intensity in stress production.Based on these findings,some pedagogical implications are given to help with the pronunciation teaching in the end,especially for the suprasegmental feature,English word stress.