Beijing Dialect And Southern Min Dialect Speakers' Perception Of English Lexical Stress

This thesis explores Beijing dialect (BD) and southern Min dialect (SM) speakers'perception of English lexical stress. English lexical stress is of FO, duration, intensity and vowel quality. Because intensity is the least reliable cue, it was excluded from the current study. As tonal languages, both BD and SM primarily use fundamental frequency to realize lexical tones. But BD demonstrates initial stress pattern, while SM represents final stress pattern. In the present study, I mainly examined the FO, duration and vowel quality in the English lexical stress perception by the learners speaking BD and SM respectively. According to the theory of language transfer, native language is likely to impact L2 learning. However, the research on how the learners'native dialect influences the perception of English lexical stress is scarce. The present study addresses the three questions below:1) How do Chinese learners speaking Beijing dialect and southern Min dialect respectively weight the acoustic cues of FO, duration and vowel quality in perceiving English lexical stress?2) Are there any differences among native English, Beijing dialect and southern Min dialect speakers in FO, duration and vowel quality of the English lexical stress?3) Are the acoustic cues governed by syllable positions in a word?In this experimental study, there are three language groups:native English speakers; Beijing dialect speakers; southern Min speakers of English, each group is of 15 participants. All of them completed an identification task, and they are at similar English proficiency levels. English disyllabic non-words that differed in stress placement were resynthesized by using Praat v.4.3.04 to contain only FO cues, only duration cues, and only vowel quality cues. SPSS v19.0 was used to analyze the participants'word-encoding, word-encoding with initial and final accuracies.The major findings are given below:(1) Although vowel quality was not a dominant cue in both Chinese dialect groups, they consistently weighted vowel quality and F0 to a greater extent than duration like NE speakers did. (2) Both BD and SM speakers were more sensitive to duration than native English speakers; however, they used duration to a less extent than NE speakers. Moreover, BD speakers are more sensitive to duration than SM speakers. (3) BD speakers showed a preference for word-initial stress in terms of duration while SM speakers showed a preference for word-final stress in the use of duration.The results from this study suggested that BD and SM speakers'utilization of suprasegmental cues (FO and duration) to perceive English lexical stress was influenced by their native dialects, while the use of segmental cues (vowel quality) is not in support of language transfer.