Identification and Analysis Of The Existence of Word Stress Variation Between The Pronunciation Of Certain English Words Of Native English Speakers and Native Telugu Speakers

Abstract

Since the decline of the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration as a whole has been on the rise especially to the United States. The newly released census report for the years 2021-22 has reported an increase of over 1 million legal immigrants to the U.S. substantially comprised of Telugu speaking individuals. This research uses 8 native Telugu speaking adults and 8 native English-speaking adults to identify, analyze, and understand the existence of word stress variation between the pronunciation of the English language between the two groups. The results indicate that there indeed exists a significant difference in the position of word stress in the Telugu speakers’ pronunciations with word stress predominantly applied to the last or second-to-last/penultimate syllable. The main cause for this shift in position was due to L1 interference from the mother tongue. These results have a plethora of implications for future research on sentences with and without punctuation marks, other major English stress rules, and different parts of speech that are commonly used in everyday language.