A cross-linguistic study of lexical stress shifts in level 1 [ + cyclic] derivations

Abstract

Laboratory phonology has been widely employed to understand the interactional relationship between the acoustic cues of English Lexical Stress (ELS)—duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity. However, research on ELS production in polysyllabic words is limited, and cross-linguistic research in this domain even more so. Hence, the impacts of second language (L2) experience and first language (L1) background on ELS acquisition have not been fully explored. This study of 100 adult Mandarin (Chinese), Arabic (Saudi Arabian), and English (Midwest American) speakers examines their ELS productions in tokens containing seven different stress-moving suffixes; i.e., Level 1 [ + cyclic] derivations according to lexical phonology. Speech samples were systematically analyzed using Praat and compared using statistical sampling. Native-speaker productions provided norm values for cross-reference to yield insights into the proposed Salience Hierarchy of the Acoustic Correlates of Stress (SHACS). The author recently reported the main findings which support the idea that SHACS exists in L1 sound schemes, and that native-like command of these systems can be acquired by L2 learners through increased L2 input. Other results are expected to reveal the role of tonic accent shift, the idiosyncrasies of individual suffixes, conflicts with standard dictionary pronunciations, and the effects of frequency perception scales on SHACS.