Investigating English Word Stress Patterns Of Early And Late Chinese EFL Learners With Two Types Of English Exposure

Age effect on L2 phonology acquisition has been a research focus, and the interaction effect of age and exposure on placing English word stress by FL learners lacks empirical evidence. The study investigated age effect on syllabic-structure and lexical-class based English stress patterns of Chinese EFL learners with two types of exposure. Thus, nonword production task was conducted involving learners with access to two types of exposure. The experiment was based on Guion (2005), from which the data of native English speakers was introduced as the control data for this study.Participants (early & late learners) were recruited from Chongqing No.1 and Jiangjin No.6 Middle Schools (n=25) by interviews and questionnaires. The participants were instructed to do the production experiment, in which each participant produced 40 nonwords of four syllabic structures in Noun and Verb frames respectively. Separate one-way ANOVAs were used to explore the effect of syllabic structure on word stress patterns for each lexical class for the five groups. Significant difference was found between each group (early & late) and native speaker group on most of the four word types in Noun frame and all word types in Verb frame. Separate one-way ANOVAs studying the syllabic structure effect on stress placement for each frame for each group were performed. Neither early nor late learners from the two schools were proved to use syllabic structure in placing stress in production as native speakers did. Separate t-tests investigating lexical class effect for each structure type for each group were performed. As the results showed, Chongqing early learners used lexical class in placing stress as native speakers did, but neither did late learners nor did Jiangjin learners.To sum up, age effect was not found among Chinese learners with the two types of English exposure on syllabic-structure based word stress patterns, but it was found among learners with exposure advantage on lexical-class based stress patterns. Thus, interaction effect of age and exposure on stress placement was found. The different performance in placing word stress based on syllabic structure between native English speakers and Chinese learners may be due to the difference between Chinese and English. The limited English exposure might be an interpretation for different performance in placing word stress between native speakers and Jiangjin learners.