Vowel reductions in the acquisition of English lexical stress by Kazakh-Russian bilinguals

Abstract

This article will focus on the vowel reductions in producing English lexical stress by Kazakh-Russian bilinguals. Even though previous research examined that Kazakh-Russian bilinguals produced English lexical stress using duration and intensity, but not fundamental frequency, using vowel reductions as cues is still a question. Since Russian and English as stress contrasted languages with vowel reductions; however, Kazakh is a fixed stress language without vowel reductions. The fourteen Kazakh-Russian bilinguals (IELTS > 7.0) produced ten minimal pairs in English in the three contexts (in sentences, fixed conditions, and isolations). We used fixed conditions as samples for analysis. Since lack of American English native speakers as a baseline, we compared the stressed syllables versus unstressed syllables based on per item (PROject versus proJECT) by measuring F1/ F2 in both syllables. The results showed that participants used vowel reductions in a variety of ways. If there is schwa reduction, participants produced correctly in which F1 and F2 were changed according to the vowel positions. Non-schwa changes produced non-consistent results in which they manipulate F1 or F2 based on the vowels, and there are wrong reductions in which/ae/produced as /ʌ/ in the example of “contract” as a final stressed word.