An Optimality Analysis On English Word Stress Produced By English Major Students

As an important suprasegmental feature, English word stress is functional on distinguishing the ambiguity. However, due to that English is a stress-timed language and Chinese is more like a syllable-timed language, Chinese English learners may have some difficulty in producing English word stress. A strong Chinese accent is frequently detected in the utterances made by the Chinese-speaking learners, which can be partly attributed to the fact that those learners are likely to have trouble in producing English word stress properly.The existing study on English word stress produced by Chinese English learners are mainly from theoretical analysis. However, an experimental study of English word stress is few and the analysis of English word stress produced by Chinese English learners within the framework is scarce. Optimality Theory is a powerful theory of grammar most notably in the area of phonology. The key point of OT is that languages differ only in that some constraints are differently ranked, and to acquire a language, one needs to re-rank those constraints. What’s more by using software called Praat, the study is going to answer two questions; What are the acoustic features of the English word stress produced by freshmen of English major? And whether freshmen of English major undergo a process of constraint re-ranking during the acquisition of English word stress or not?The findings of the study indicate that there are three acoustic characteristics that the freshmen of English major have when producing English word stress. This first one is stress assignment. Freshmen of English major tend to assign stress on unstressed syllables and when comes to compound words, the awareness of the stressed syllables and unstressed syllables are very weak and their acquiring of the right stress assignment in a compound word is not satisfying. The second one is that as for the vowel duration, freshmen of English major tend to give almost same length of time on stressed vowels and unstressed vowels. And the third one is that they tend to give much more intensity on stressed syllables than native speakers.What’s more, this study found that freshmen of English major students did undergo a process of constraint re-ranking. It is clearly that the constraint*CLASH have undergo a process of demotion, which indicates that freshmen of English major students tend to stress the adjacent syllables.The present study is an in-depth research into the producing of English word stress by Chinese English learners. So its theoretical implications for future work on related topics as well as its empirical impact on the practice of English teaching, especially English pronunciation teaching in China.