Lexical Stress Placement Research Articles

Homogeneity and heterogeneity in lexical stress placement among Ugandan speakers of English as an L2: a view from usage-based perspective

Abstract The study delineates divergences that set apart the Ugandan accent from RP with respect to primary lexical stress placement, as well as divergences that evince variability among Ugandans. For example, differences from RP were (almost) homogenously observed in the words effect, cassava, agreement, arrest, alarm, with stress placed on the first syllable of all these nouns, while inter-speaker variability was substantially observed in words such as bursar, further, with some speakers placing stress on both syllables of the words, while others had the stress on the first syllable only. Analogy and underlying substrate influence account for the divergences, with substrate influence considered along the lines of what Wells (1982) refers to as ‘lexical distribution.

Türkçede Bulunan Hint-Avrupa Dil Ailesine Ait Kelimelerin İngilizce Konuşan Türkler Tarafından İngilizce Telaffuzunda Sözcük Vurgusu Analizi

This study investigated lexical stress placement in English pronunciation of Indo-European words loaned to Turkish by Turkish speakers of English. We aimed to increase awareness of prosodic features since misusage of primary stress causes breakdowns in communication. The sample consists of 20 students in the ELT Department of a public university in Turkey and 10 native English speakers. The non-native speakers were divided into two groups for the purpose of observing the effect of treatment on lexical stress patterns of English. The participants were asked to read 30 tokens in isolation and in sentences while their speech were being recorded. The audio files were analyzed through Praat to determine where the participants placed primary stress. The accuracy of primary stress placement for each word was determined according to IPA transcriptions. The findings of the study revealed that there is a statistically significant difference in the accuracy of primary stress placement between native speakers and Turkish speakers of English. Negative L1 transfer was detected in the placement of lexical stress in the recordings of Turkish participants. The results showed that the participants receiving the treatment made significant progress. Furthermore, no statistically significant difference was found between isolated and in-sentence utterances. The findings of this study can serve as a tool for language teachers to create materials and effective resources that eliminate these difficulties for NNSs at any level of language education.

Lexical stress variation and rhythmic alternation in Russian

Abstract Our paper investigates lexical stress placement variation in Modern Standard Russian past tense verbal forms. This kind of variation has arisen due to complex interactions of various processes in the development of Russian and its present-day state is said (often rather impressionistically) to be conditioned by intra-speaker sociolinguistic factors. However, cases of inter-speaker variation can also be observed. We put forward a proposal that stress placement in forms with variable stress is influenced by the rhythmic pattern of immediate linear context. To support this, we report on a pilot experiment that shows a preference towards alternating rhythm in a sequence consisting of a past tense verbal form of a transitive verb and its direct object, thus conforming to the fundamental principle of rhythmic alternation. The results also raise some questions about the phonology of stress and stress variation in Russian and beyond.

The level of awareness and production of English lexical stress among English language teacher trainees in Malaysia

The realisation of lexical stress among Malaysian speakers of English is likely to be different from other varieties of English. In spite of this, there is a preference for a native pronunciation model in the teaching of English in Malaysia. In relation to this issue, this paper focuses on lexical stress among a group of Teaching of English as a Second Language teacher trainees. The objectives of this paper are to assess the overall level of awareness of lexical stress among them, to examine their production of lexical stress, and to determine the link between their level of awareness and production. The method used to elicit data for the first objective was a Lexical Stress Awareness Test (LSAT), completed by 104 teacher trainees. Data for the second objective were obtained by recording the trainees reading sentences containing test words. The findings from the LSAT indicate that most of the trainees have an intermediate level of awareness of English lexical stress. They were generally unable to describe the characteristics of a stressed syllable. In addition, the findings from the acoustic analysis of the recordings suggest that they did not have a systematic pattern of stressing syllables with the main correlate of stress being vowel lengthening. In contrast, most of them chose ‘higher pitch’ as the characteristic of a stressed syllable. Hence, there is an inconsistency between their awareness and production of lexical stress in English. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to the teaching of pronunciation in the classroom and the effect of lexical stress placement on intelligibility. Our general conclusion is that more attention needs to be given in teacher education to how lexical stress is used in English, and also to the characteristics of stress in the Malaysian variety of English.

Stress Judgment and Production in English Derivation, and Word Reading in Adult Mandarin-Speaking English Learners

For monolingual English-speaking children, judgment and production of stress in derived words, including words with phonologically neutral (e.g., -ness) and non-neutral suffixes (e.g., -ity), is important to both academic vocabulary growth and to word reading. For Mandarin-speaking adult English learners (AELs) the challenge of learning the English stress system might be complicated by cross-linguistic differences in prosodic function and features. As Mandarin-speakers become more proficient in English, patterns similar to those seen in monolingual children could emerge in which awareness and use of stress and suffix cues benefit word reading. A correlational design was used to examine the contributions of English stress in derivation with neutral and non-neutral suffixes to English word and nonword reading. Stress judgment in non-neutral derivation predicted word reading after controlling for working memory and English vocabulary; whereas stress production in neutral derivation contributed to word reading and pseudoword decoding, independent of working memory and English vocabulary. Although AELs could use stress and suffix cues for word reading, AELs were different from native English speakers in awareness of non-neutral suffix cues conditioning lexical stress placement. AELs may need to rely on lexical storage of primary stress in derivations with non-neutral suffixes.

Demonstration of Problems of Lexical Stress on the Pronunciation Turkish English Teachers and Teacher Trainees by Computer

Abstract Stress is an important intonational and prosodic feature both in North American English (NAE) and Brtish English (BrE.); therefore, lexical stress placement of the speaker and its perception as lexical stress detection occupy a crucial role in teaching English as a foreign language. The identification, determination and assignment of lexical stress are crucial issues because the perception of stressed syllables can provide non-native speaking teachers islands of reliability where the phonetic information is more prominent. But still the issue of stress assignment has not received much attention in foreign language teacher training programs. This paper stresses that nuclear stress placement has important implications for non-native speaking teachers.

Speaking Rate Affects the Perception of Duration as a Suprasegmental Lexical-stress Cue

Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical-stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be judged as coming from one of two longer words that matched the fragment segmentally but differed in lexical stress placement. Word pairs contrasted primary stress on either the first versus the second syllable or the first versus the third syllable. Duration of the initial or the second syllable of the fragments and rate of the preceding context (fast vs. slow) were manipulated. Listeners used speaking rate to decide about the degree of stress on initial syllables whether the syllables' absolute durations were informative about stress (Experiment Ia) or not (Experiment Ib). Rate effects on the second syllable were visible only when the initial syllable was ambiguous in duration with respect to the preceding rate context (Experiment 2). Absolute second syllable durations contributed little to stress perception (Experiment 3). These results suggest that speaking rate is used to disambiguate words and that rate-modulated stress cues are more important on initial than noninitial syllables. Speaking rate affects perception of suprasegmental information.

The weighting of vowel quality in native and non-native listeners’ perception of English lexical stress

Although vowel quality is an important cue to the perception of English lexical stress, few studies have examined the role this cue plays for non-native speakers. Previous research found that Mandarin speakers had problems using vowel reduction as a cue in English lexical stress production. Assuming native-like perception is a prerequisite to native-like production for non-native speech, this study compared the weight Mandarin learners and native speakers of English gave to vowel quality as a cue to English lexical stress in comparison to that given to f0, duration and intensity under natural and flat pitch contour conditions. Listeners judged lexical stress placement in synthesized tokens of the word desert, in which the first syllable de- was varied systematically in vowel quality and each of the other cues depending on the pair of cues in focus. Results showed that both English and Mandarin listeners consistently weighted vowel quality more than other cues. Vowel quality and duration were treated as a combinational cue by both language groups. However, Mandarin and English listeners showed different patterns for the processing of vowel quality and other prosodic cues, and Mandarin listeners’ processing of vowel quality and pitch cues was influenced by the pitch contour conditions. These findings can be explained in terms of language-specific or cue-specific influence, and provide new insight into the relationship between production and perception in second language speech learning.

The weighting of vowel quality in perception of English lexical stress.

Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional, involving F0, duration, intensity, and vowel quality. Previous research found that Mandarin speakers had problems using vowel reduction in English lexical stress production. Assuming nativelike perception is a prerequisite to nativelike production for non-native speech, the weight of vowel quality with comparison to that of F0, duration, and intensity in Mandarin listeners’ stress perception was examined. Mandarin and English listeners judged lexical stress placement in synthesized tokens of desert, in which the first syllable /de/ was varied along vowel quality and each of the other cues depending on the pair of cues in focus. Results showed that both Mandarin and English listeners consistently weighted vowel quality more than the other cues. Vowel quality and duration were treated as combinational cues by both groups. English listeners used both intensity and vowel quality (separately), while Mandarin listeners did not use intensity at all. Findings suggest that Mandarin listeners had a nativelike use of vowel quality for perceiving English stress. However, Mandarin listeners treated F0 in a different way from English listeners, possibly owing to the influence of their native tonal background. Implications for the interaction between production and perception in second-language learning will be also discussed. [Work supported by Purdue Linguistics.]

A Contrastive Study of Prosody and Lexical Stress Placement in Singapore English and British English

It has been claimed that Singapore English and British English differ in stress placement: Singapore English speakers stress the final syllables of polysyllabic words such as flawlessly which are stressed initially in British English. Two considerations lead us to question the cross-varietal difference in stress placement. Firstly, we note that previous comparative studies have investigated stress differences in nuclear position. In this position, however, cues to a boundary and cues to stress may be confounded. Secondly, differences in stress placement have not been suggested by Singapore English speakers, but by British English analysts who may have presupposed comparable acoustic cues to stress in the two varieties. Thus, we hypothesize that it is not the flocation of lexical stress which differs in the two varieties, but the acoustic realization of stress. In the present paper this hypothesis was tested experimentally. Ten Singapore English and ten British English speakers produced polysyllabic words in nuclear, intonation phrase-final, and in non-nuclear, intonation phrase-medial position. Duration and F0 measurements were taken. The results do not support the claimed cross-varietal difference in flexical stress placement. In nuclear position, Singapore English test items are associated with significantly more phrase-final flengthening than British English test items. Additionally, we find a flack of “deprominencing” in F0 in Singapore English, that is, the difference between the nuclear syllable and following unstressed syllables is less clearly marked. In prenuclear position, the cross-varietal differences in duration and F0 disappear.

Acoustic-perceptual correlates of sentence prominence in Italian questions and statements

Recent research on the acoustic correlates of perceived accentual prominence in speech has generally focused on fundamental frequency (F0), while few studies have attempted to shed light on how other parameters, such as duration and intensity, might interact with F0. A previous study on Italian suggests that duration has a major role in signaling lexical stress placement in isolated words [Bertinetto (1980)]. The present work reports on results of an experiment using synthetic speech to test which aspects of the signal, among F0, duration, and intensity, are more influential in the extraction of prominence structure at the sentence level and if there are differences between questions and statements. To this scope, a series of LPC-resynthesized stimuli were hybridized following a technique first developed by Nakatani and Aston (1978) and later adopted in Beckman (1986) and Hirschberg and Ward (1993) for English. Specifically, two-word sentences with varying modality (question or statement) and accent structure were manipulated in order to shift the location of perceived prominence from that of nonhybrid stimuli. The stimuli were presented to 21 speakers of the Neapolitan variety of Italian. The results suggest a greater role of duration within question stimuli than within statements.

Effects of lexical stress placement on auditory word recognition

Research was conducted examining the role of lexical stress in auditory word recognition. In a series of experiments, isolated spoken words were presented to subjects with correctly produced stress pattern (CS) or incorrectly produced stress pattern (IS). In three separate experiments subjects were asked to identify the CS and IS items in varying amounts of white noise, make a lexical decision or monitor for any items that were nouns. The results revealed no effect of stress replacement on identification of words in noise, but revealed a significant effect of stress placement on lexical decision and noun monitoring response times. The role of lexical stress information in auditory word recognition will be discussed in light of these results. [Work supported by NIH.]