Acoustic Characteristics Of English Lexical Stress Produced By Northern And Southern Chinese Learners Of English

Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional, involving fundamentalfrequency (F0), duration and intensity. As a tone language, F0plays a significant rolein Mandarin Chinese. Meanwhile, duration also plays an important role in speechperception and production. Second language learners have difficulty in English lexicalstress because they can not have a native-like performance. Traditionally, this has beenattributed to transfer of their first language (L1). The errors in any or all of thesecorrelates could interfere with perception and production of the stress contrast.According to the theory of language transfer, it is supposed that Mandarin speakers andChangsha dialect speakers may have different performances in their production ofEnglish lexical stress. The present study explores the following two questions:1) Do both northern and southern Chinese learners of English produce Englishlexical stress in a way like native speakers in terms of F0, duration and intensity?2) In producing English lexical stress, are there any differences betweennorthern and southern Chinese learners of English in terms of F0, duration andintensity?The participants in this study were divided into three groups: one group wascomposed of10Mandarin speakers of English (northern Chinese learners of English);another group of10Changsha speakers of English (southern learners of English);another group of10native American English speakers. Each group consisted of5maleand5female. The average age of American speakers was25and that of ChineseEnglish learners was21. All Chinese learners of English are non-English majors inHunan University. An acoustic study focusing on the implementation of mean F0,duration, and intensity in stressed and unstressed vowels in noun-verb word pairscontrasting in stress location (e.g. DEsert and deSERT) was conducted.The major findings are given below:1) Although both Chinese learners of Englishused F0, duration and intensity to signal stress, they had a higher F0and strongerintensity in their production due to the influence of Mandarin tone.2) SouthernChinese learners of English performed differently on the use of duration, since theyused a larger proportion of duration than northern Chinese learners of English in theirproduction of English lexical stress, which is caused by the characteristic of durationin Changsha dialect. What’s more, both northern and southern Chinese learners ofEnglish had similar performance like native speakers on the production of different stress patterns. They all have a better use of F0in nouns than in verbs. Also, southernlearners of English have a better performance in nouns than in verbs when they usedduration to signal stress.The results from this study suggested that Chinese learners’ acquisition of Englishlexical stress was influenced by their native language. Therefore, in the teaching ofEnglish, teachers should attach more attention to the teaching of English stress andhelp students to produce English lexical stress more specifically. It is also teachers’responsibility to make students practice English more, so as to improve the accuracyand fluency of their English.