Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T02:19:36.852Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 11 - Production of English Lexical Stress by Arabic Speakers

from Part III - Acquiring Suprasegmental Features

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2021

Ratree Wayland
Affiliation:
University of Florida
Get access

Summary

The present study investigated the production of lexical stress by native speakers of English (NE), Arabic learners of English (ALE), and native speakers of Arabic (NA). In the first experiment, minimal pairs (e.g., ‘con.flict, con.’flict) were recorded by 8 native speakers of English and 16 (8 advanced and 8 beginning) learners. For comparison, a second experiment examined acoustic cues used to indicate stress in 8 native Arabic speakers. In both experiments, four acoustic cues were examined: duration, fundamental frequency, amplitude, and second formant frequency. Results showed that NE consistently used all four cues to signal stress, with longer duration, higher fundamental frequency, higher amplitude, and less reduced vowel quality for stressed syllables. Advanced ALE, but not the beginning ALE, made distinctions in duration and amplitude similar to the duration and amplitude cues used by NE. For fundamental frequency, both advanced and beginning ALE produced even higher fundamental frequency values for stressed syllables than NE and both learner groups produced full (unreduced) vowels in stressed and unstressed syllables. Implications for acoustic cues to lexical stress in English as a second language are discussed.

Type
Chapter
Information
Second Language Speech Learning
Theoretical and Empirical Progress
, pp. 290 - 311
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Archibald, J. (1992). Transfer of L1 parameter settings: Some empirical evidence from Polish metrics. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 37, 301339.Google Scholar
Archibald, J. (1993). The learnability of English metrical parameters by adult Spanish speakers. International Review of Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching, 31/32, 129142.Google Scholar
Beckman, M. (1986). Stress and non-stress accent. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2007). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (Version 4.6.05) [Computer program].Google Scholar
Chrabaszcz, A., Winn, M., Lin, C. Y., & Idsardi, W. J. (2014). Acoustic cues to perception of word stress by English, Mandarin, and Russian speakers. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57, 14681479. doi:10.1044/2014_JSLHR-L-13-0279CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cooper, N., Cutler, A., & Wales, R. (2002). Constraints of lexical stress on lexical access in English: Evidence from native and non-native listeners. Language and Speech, 45, 207228. doi:10.1177/00238309020450030101Google Scholar
Cutler, A. (2005). Lexical stress. In Pisoni, D & Remez, R (Eds.), Handbook of speech perception (pp. 264289). Malden, MA: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A. (2015). Lexical stress in English pronunciation. In Reed, M & Levis, J. M. (Eds.), The handbook of English pronunciation (pp. 106124). Chichester, England: John Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1988). The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14(1), 113121.Google Scholar
De Jong, K., & Zawaydeh, B. (1999). Stress, duration and intonation in Arabic word-level prosody. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastian, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing “deafness” in French? Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 406421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dupoux, E., Sebastian-Galles, N., Navarrete, E., & Peperkamp, S. (2008). Persistent stress “deafness”: The case of French learners of Spanish. Cognition, 106, 682706.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Flege, J. E. (1981). The phonological basis of foreign accent: A hypothesis. TESOL Quarterly, 15(4), 443455.Google Scholar
Flege, J. E. (1987). The production of “new” and “similar” phones in a foreign language: Evidence for the effect of equivalence classification. Journal of Phonetics, 15, 4765.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flege, J., & Bohn, O. (1989). In instrumental study of vowel reduction and stress placement in Spanish-accented English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 11, 3562.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Folkes, J., & Bond, Z. (1989). The vowels of stressed and unstressed syllables in nonnative English. Language Learning, 39, 341373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fry, D. (1955). Duration and intensity as physical correlates of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 27(4), 765768.Google Scholar
Fry, D. (1958). Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech, 1, 126152.Google Scholar
Guion, S. G. (2005). Knowledge of English word stress patterns in early and late Korean-English bilinguals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 503533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guion, S. G., Clark, J. J., Harada, T., & Wayland, R. P. (2003). Factors affecting stress placement for English non-words include syllabic structure, lexical class, and stress patterns of phonologically similar words. Language and Speech, 46, 403427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guion, S. G., Harada, T., & Clark, J. J. (2004). Early and late Spanish-English bilinguals’ acquisition of English word stress patterns. Bilingualism Language and Cognition, 7, 207226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, B. (1995). Metrical stress theory: Principles and case studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hyman, L. (1978). Tone and/or accent. In Napoli, D. J. (Ed.), Elements of tone, stress, and intonation (pp. 120). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2014). Suprasegmental lexical stress cues in visual speech can guide spoken word recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67, 793808.Google Scholar
Jesse, A., Poellmann, K., & Kong, Y-Y. (2017). English listeners use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress early during spoken word recognition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60, 19.Google Scholar
Lehiste, I., & Fox, R. A. (1992). Perception of prominence by Estonian and English listeners. Language and Speech, 35, 419434.Google Scholar
Lieberman, P. (1960). Some acoustic correlates of word stress in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 32, 451454.Google Scholar
Lin, C. Y., Wang, M. I. N., Idsardi, W. J., & Xu, Y. I. (2014). Stress processing in Mandarin and Korean second language learners of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17, 316346. doi:10.1017/s1366728913000333CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mattys, S. L. (2000). The perception of primary and secondary stress in English. Perception and Psychophysics, 62, 253265.Google Scholar
Mattys, S. L., & Samuel, A. G. (2000). Implications of stress-pattern differences in spoken-word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 42, 571596.Google Scholar
Nasr, R. T. (1960). Phonemic length in Lebanese Arabic. Phonetica, 5, 209211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nespor, M., Shukla, M., & Mehler, J. (2011). Stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages. In van Oostendorp, M, Ewen, C, Hume, E, & Rice, K (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology (pp. 11471159). Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ortega-Llebaria, M., Gu, H., & Fan, J. (2013). English speakers’ perception of Spanish lexical stress: Context-driven L2 stress perception. Journal of Phonetics, 41, 186197. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2013.01.006Google Scholar
Peperkamp, S., & Dupoux, E. (2002). A typological study of stress deafness. In Gussenhoven, C (Ed.), Proceedings of laboratory phonology 7 (pp. 203240). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pulleyblank, D. (1986). Tone in lexical phonology. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reinisch, E., Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2010). Early use of phonetic information in spoken word recognition: Lexical stress drives eye movements immediately. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(4), 772783. doi:10.1080/17470210903104412.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sereno, J., & Jongman, A. (1995). Acoustic correlates of grammatical class. Language and Speech, 38, 5776.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sluijter, A. M. C., & van Heuven, V. J. (1996). Spectral balance as an acoustic correlate of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 100, 24712485.Google Scholar
Teng, E. (2001). The use of stress and vowel reduction by Chinese learners of English. MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Thelwall, R., & Saadeddin, M. (1990). Arabic. Journal of the International Phonetics Association, 20, 3739.Google Scholar
Ueyama, M. (2000). Prosodic transfer: An acoustic study of L2 English versus L2 Japanese. PhD thesis, UCLA.Google Scholar
van der Hulst, H., & Smith, N. (1988). Autosegmental studies on pitch accent. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wayland, R., & Guion, S. (2003). Perceptual discrimination of Thai tones by naive and experienced learners of Thai. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 113129.Google Scholar
Wayland, R., Guion, S. G., & Landfair, B. L. (2006). Native Thai speakers’ acquisition of English word stress patterns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 35, 285304.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yu, V., & Andruski, J. E. (2010). A cross-language study of perception of lexical stress in English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 39, 323344.Google Scholar
Yu, V., & Andruski, J. E. (2011). The effect of language experience on perception of stress typicality in English nouns and verbs. The Mental Lexicon, 6(2), 275301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Y., & Francis, A. (2010). The weighting of vowel quality in native and non-native listeners’ perception of English lexical stress. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 260271. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2009.11.00CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Y., Nissen, S., & Francis, A. (2008). Acoustic characteristics of English lexical stress produced by native Mandarin speakers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123(6), 44984513.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×