Acquisition Of Word Stress Patterns In Chinese Learners Of English

The aim of the thesis is to investigate effects of three factors, namely, syllabicstructure, lexical class and stress pattern of phonological similar words, on stressplacement of Chinese learners of English on the basis of Critical Period Hypothesisand the other two typological hierarchical models of stress: the Stress Deafness Model(Peperkamp&Dupoux2002) and the Stress Typology Model (Altmann&Vogel2002)Having a good knowledge of phonetics of the target language exerts substantialeffects on the acquisition of stress placement pattern of Chinese learners of English,and thus the research on acquisition of stress placement pattern has been attachedmore importance to by researchers and linguists. Mehler et al (1998) found that nativespeaker’s acquisition of prosodic features of native language comes into being veryearly in life, when they are highly likely to acquire the system with little effort in thegiven environment. While adult learners of second language are irreversibly affectedby their native language when learning the second language.This thesis aims to investigate how Chinese learners of English acquire Englishstress placement pattern. There are three experiments conducted, one production task,one perception task and one gathering phonological similar words to the non words.20participants were divided into two groups, one comprised of10senior high-schoolstudents who have been in USA for study for at least two and a half year, and oneconsisting of10college students who are attending universities in China and neverhave been to English-speaking countries. Initially, subjects were required to produce40non words with four types of syllabic structures as nouns and verbs in two sentenceframes. In addition, all participants were required to demonstrate their preference toinitial or final syllable stress on the identical40non words. Ultimately, they, as areasked, wrote down the existing English words which they believe to bephonologically analogous to the40non words.The results of production experiments and logistic regression analysis show thatall three factors exert effects on the production of English stress, of whichphonological similarity affects the production to the highest degree, second in termsof effect is lexical class and syllable structure yields the least significance; the resultsof perception experiments and logistic regression indicate that phonological similarityand lexical class yield effects on the perception of English stress for the seniorhigh-school students and only phonological similarity affects the perception ofEnglish stress for college students. To sum up, based on the experiments results and the regression analysis throughSPSS16.0, we may safely come to the conclusion that all three factors affect thestress placement of Chinese learners of English, of which phonological similarityyields the greatest significant effects and syllable structure affect the least. Massiveexposure to the second language and age exert effects as well. To be more accurate,the syllabic structure and lexical class exert more effects when the second languagelearners are exposed to the environment of second language at a younger age.