An OT account of the precedence relationship between perception and production in the acquisition of English stress

Abstract

This paper examined the relationship between perception and production by conducting experiments on 20 Japanese learners’ acquisition of English word stress. Specifically, the paper investigated whether Japanese EFL learners’ acquisition of English word stress was affected by factors such as syntactic category (noun vs. adjective) and suffix type (level 1 vs. level 2 suffixes), as well as word type (real vs. nonce word). Overall, Japanese learners’ perception accuracy was higher than their production accuracy, confirming the precedence of perception over production across the factors examined, similar to the results of Korean EFL learners in Lee (2006, 2007). However, rather different learner variation patterns emerged between Japanese and Korean EFL learners. The precedence relationship as well as different learner variation patterns was accounted for by the perception-production model proposed by Pater (2004) within Optimality Theory. Implications of the proposed analysis for language acquisition and lexical representations were further discussed.