212 / 2021-06-30 21:16:14

Perception and Production of English Lexical Stress by Chinese Students

Mandarin Word Prominence,English Lexical Stress,Perception,Production,Language Transfer

Stress refers to phonetic prominence of one syllable compared with the other adjacent syllables within a word. It is the focus and difficulty of studies on English language and English phonetic acquisition. Opinions on whether Chinese, as a tone language, has lexical stress or not have never been unified. Heretofore research of English stress emphasizes on many aspects involving stress perception, stress production, stress acquisition and English-Mandarin contrast study. However, researchers seldom systematically study the influence of Mandarin Chinese’s perception pattern towards the perception and production of English lexical stress by Chinese students. Therefore, this study investigates Chinese students’ perception and production of English disyllabic word stress based on their perception pattern of Mandarin two-character words’ phonetic features. 160 Mandarin two-character words and 160 disyllabic words are applied as stimuli to conduct one production experiment and four perception experiments respectively. Then a questionnaire is distributed to learn one’s awareness of stress. The research subject is 8 Chinese students (4 males and 4 females). This study applies mean value comparison, variance comparison and duration ratio, pitch range ratio and energy ratio. Results show that Chinese students' dependence on intensity and their preference for first syllable prominent in Mandarin two-character word prominence perception have a positive transfer on their production and perception of English disyllabic word stress. The iambic tendency of Chinese students’ production in pitch range has a negative transfer on their production of English disyllabic word stress.

Figure 5. 3 Gender Difference in Tone Group	Figure 5. 7 Accuracy of English Disyllabic Word’ Stress Perception
Figure 5. 17 Pitch Range Ratios of Disyllabic Words