An Analysis Of The Acquisition Of English Sentence Stress By Chinese EFL Learners From The Perspective Of Optimality Theory

As one of the suprasegmental features in the English phonetic system,stress has a pivotal role concerned with the semantic and pragmatic levels of English.The naturalness and intelligibility of an utterance will be greatly influenced by the proper sentence stress distribution.According to the literature review,the exploration of sentence stress acquisition mainly starts from the field of second language acquisition at home and abroad,which is based on the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis and the Interlanguage Hypothesis.Although these two hypotheses have certain reference values in the study of sentence stress acquisition of second language learners,they still remain at the level of negative transfer and phonetic representation description of Chinese English learners’ acquisition process,there is still an important remaining problem to be solved,that is,what is the root cause of sentence stress distribution errors of Chinese EFL learners.Therefore,this study attempts to fill this research gap.There are mainly three research questions in this study:(1)What principles do Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers use as constraints in the process of sentence stress acquisition?(2)In the process of sentence stress acquisition,have Chinese EFL learners experienced the constraint ranking? If so,what is the specific demotion ranking of constraints for Chinese EFL learners with different sentence stress acquisition levels?(3)For Chinese EFL learners with different sentence stress acquisition levels,is there a constraint that plays a key role in the process of sentence stress acquisition? If so,does the ranking change of that constraint have a certain regularity?As a mainstream theory in the field of phonology,Optimality Theory not only has strong explanatory power in explaining natural language phenomena and first language acquisition,but also has applicability in the field of second language acquisition.This study takes Optimality Theory as the theoretical framework,the researcher conducts convenience sampling,selects 36 Chinese EFL learners and 2 native English speakers as the research subjects by using the questionnaire and divides them into experimental group and control group for experimental research to solve the above three research questions.Firstly,the acoustic software Praat is used to analyze the designated reading materials read by three groups of Chinese EFL learners with different sentence stress acquisition levels and two native English speakers.Secondly,for the stress output data collected from the acoustic experiment,this study will further use the Optimality Theory to analyze the six constraints account for the data produced by Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers,and then summarize the specific constraint rankings for Chinese English learners with different sentence stress acquisition levels,so as to infer the internal mechanism affecting Chinese English learners’ sentence stress acquisition.The research findings show that:(1)Chinese English learners and native English speakers mainly use six principles as their constraints in the process of sentence stress acquisition.They are respectively DEP-IO(P),MAX-IO(P),NOCLASH,NOP(OI),ALIGN-IP-RIGHT and ALIGN-IP-LEFT.(2)In the process of sentence stress acquisition,Chinese EFL learners have undergone the constraint re-ranking.And for Chinese EFL learners with different sentence stress acquisition levels,the hierarchical ranking of constraint is also different.(3)For Chinese EFL learners with different sentence stress acquisition levels,the constraint MAX-IO(P)plays a key role in the process of stress acquisition.And the moving path also has a certain regularity,that is,the position of MAX-IO(P)in the constraint ranking continues to demotion.This study is an in-depth exploration of Chinese English learners’ sentence stress acquisition under the framework of Optimality Theory.It not only offers a fresh perspective on the sentence stress research and verifies the interpretability and applicability of Optimality Theory to sentence stress acquisition,but also has some enlightenments to the relevant research in the field of second language acquisition.It also serves as a vital compass in English classroom teaching in China.