Acquisition of lexical stress by Mandarin learners

Abstract

Acoustic characteristics of stress were examined in second language learners’ productions of English lexical stress. Fourteen minimal pairs of disyllabic English nouns and verbs contrasting in stress pattern (trochees and iambs; e.g., OBject and obJECT) were recorded. Eighteen Chinese learners of English (NNSs) (nine advanced, nine basic) and ten native speakers of English (NSs) participated in the experiment. Preliminary results indicate that subjects in all groups use vowel duration, F0, and intensity to distinguish the nouns and verbs but the correlates were realized differently. In nouns, NSs and both groups of NNSs pattern similarly in their use of duration. However, both basic and advanced non-native learners use F0 and intensity to a lesser extent than NSs. For verbs, NSs differ from NNSs in the realization of duration and F0 but not intensity. In addition, basic learners have significantly smaller duration differences but greater F0 differences between stressed and unstressed syllables when compared to NSs while advanced learners pattern in between the basic and NS groups. These results are discussed with respect to how suprasegmental features of the native language affect the prosodic acquisition of a second language.