| The acquisition of English lexical stress by Mandarin L2 learners was examined through production and perception studies. An acoustic study focusing on the implementation of mean F0, max F0, duration, intensity, and F2 in stressed and unstressed vowels in noun-verb word pairs contrasting in stress location (e.g. object and object) was conducted. The results from native English speakers (n=10) showed that all correlates were utilized to signal stress in nouns. In verbs, however, mean and max F0 were not utilized and duration cues were amplified. Implementation patterns for Mandarin L2 learners (beginning=9; advanced=9) were similar to native speakers in nouns. However, in verbs learners used mean and max F0 as well. Reduction of unstressed vowels was found to be inconsistent in learners when compared to native speakers. A perceptual study utilizing the disyllabic nonword 'dada', with resynthesized max F0, duration, and vowel quality, was conducted in order to evaluate the perceptual relevance of those cues in stress perception. Results from an identification task indicate that full vowels induce significantly stronger stress perception in all listener groups. In terms of max F0 and duration, beginning listeners (n=25) relied mainly on duration, advanced listeners (n=25) focused more on max F0, while native listeners (n=25) made use of both duration and max F0 in perception. These findings are discussed in terms of the similarities and differences in prosodic systems between Mandarin and English, as well as the possible discrepancies in production and perception data from second language learning research. |
