Effects of English Proficiency on Chinese Students Recognition and Pronunciation of English Lexical Stress

Abstract

English is a stress-timed language, stress is very important in English. However, Chinese is a tonal language, which leads to pronunciation difficulties for Chinese students in learning English. This study studies the recognition and production of English lexical stress by Chinese students who are not English majors and the factors that may affect stress assignments. Eight students between the ages of 18-22 (four males and four females) who have passed CET 6 will be tested, including a phonetic quiz and a listening test. Four kinds of vocabularies were selected as research materials: Polysyllabic Word, Word with Affixes, Compound Word, and Homograph. Results indicate that: (1) For non-English major students, the correlation between English proficiency and lexical stress is not high, but is mostly affected by personal reading habits; (2) Students know very little about the word stress. They identify and pronounce stress relying on their personal habits.