Perception of English sentence stress by Yarmouk University English majors

Abstract

Perception of English sentence stress at discourse level was the focus of the present paper. Twenty English majors, freshmen and seniors at Yarmouk University, voluntarily took part in the study. In the scope of this paper, it was assumed that the subject would give diverse responses on the test material which comprised 13 English utterances, each of which was produced with the correct stress pattern by native speakers of American English. The subject’s dependence on their native language perceptual pattern (i.e., Arabic in this case) made them fail to take advantage of the auditory correlates of stress such as pitch, duration, and loudness in the most appropriate way. The subjects’ task was to mark out the constituent made most prominent by the native speaker in each utterance. Their responses were then classified as normal (if stress was correctly perceived), contrastive (if it was perceived on a different constituent), or undecided (if the utterance was perceived unstressed altogether or if two constituents or more were stressed simultaneously). It turned out that the subjects sometimes perceived stress on constituents that are hardly stressed such as pronouns; determiners and prepositions made it clear that the subjects’ mastery of the phenomenon under discussion was inadequate.