The Effect Of Age And English Exposure On The Learning Of English Word Stress Patterns In Chinese Efl Learners

A large body of studies has been focused on the effect of age on the acquisition of English word stress patterns in immigration settings, whereas only Jia (2009) has investigated the interaction effect of age and exposure on the learning of English word stress patterns by FL learners so far. But she just conducted the production experiment without the perception one which might reveal knowledge of stress patterns not found in the production data. Thus it is quite necessary to conduct the current study which designed a production and a perception experiment to investigate the interaction effect of age and exposure on the learning of English word stress patterns by Chinese urban and rural learners. The two experiments were based on Guion (2003), from which the data of native English speakers was adopted as the control group data for this study.The author selected 100 participants (early and late learners) from Dengfeng No.1 and Dajindian No.5 Middle Schools (n=25) by interviews and questionnaires to do the two experiments. First, the participants produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of four syllabic structures as nouns and verbs. Second, they indicated their preference for first or second syllable stress of the same words in a perception task. Separate one-way ANOVAs and t-tests were performed and the results yielded that in the production experiment, the early learners from urban areas displayed a reduced effect of syllabic structure compared to the native speakers, as well as the same effect of lexical class with the native speakers. But none of the other three groups showed any effect of either syllabic structure or lexical class. In the perception experiment, the early learners from urban areas used both syllabic-structure and lexical-class based knowledge in judging English word stress as native speakers did. However, the other three groups performed only partly similarly to the native speakers in syllabic structure knowledge, while almost totally differently from the native speakers in lexical class knowledge. Thus, in the two experiments the effect of age was revealed among urban learners with English exposure advantage. Besides, the performance of learners from both urban and rural areas in the perception experiment was more native-like than that in the production one.To sum up, the interaction effect of age and English exposure on the learning English word stress patterns of Chinese EFL learners was found in both production and perception experiments. The different performance between Chinese learners and native speakers might be due to the difference between English and Chinese, while the limited English exposure might explain the absence of the effect of age among Chinese rural learners.