An Acoustic Study Of English Lexical Stress Produced By Wu Dialect Speakers

Second language learners of English often have difficulties in English lexical stress perception and production.This has generally been ascribed to prosodic transfer from their first language(L1).Similarly,Chinese learners of English might have the tonal transfer from Chinese.However,there has little research aiming to the investigation on the production and perception of English lexical stress from the perspective of Wu dialect.The present research is to illustrate the acoustic characteristics of English lexical stress produced by Wu dialect speakers in terms of F0,duration and intensity.The three detailed research questions of this thesis are as follows:1)Can Wu dialect speakers employ F0,duration and intensity in producing English lexical stress like English native speakers?2)If they can,what are the differences between the two language groups?3)How does Wu dialect affect the production of English lexical stress for Wu dialect speakers?16 native speakers of English(NE)and 16 Wu dialect speakers participated in the experiment.And the group of native speakers of English is designed as a control group.All Wu dialect speakers are from Hunan University.The materials of this experiment are 14 noun-verb word pairs contrasting in stress location,and the experiment is originally based on the methodology of Yuwen Lai(2008).The study has three findings as follows:1)Like native English speakers,Wu dialect speakers utilized the acoustic cues of F0,duration and intensity in producing English lexical stress.2)Two language groups had different performances in the use of acoustic correlates.Wu dialect speakers had a larger extent of use in F0,duration than native English speakers in their production of stress,and they had a smaller extent use of intensity than native English speakers.3)The three acoustic correlates were used differently between nouns and verbs.Wu dialect speakers used higher F0 and stronger intensity in nouns than in verbs but they used shorter duration in nouns than in verbs.The background of Wu dialect had an influence on the production of English lexical stress.The results from this study manifested that the uses of F0,duration and intensity in English lexical stress production for Wu dialect speakers were affected by the background of Wu dialect.In the process of teaching English,teachers should pay more attention to the teaching of English lexical stress in terms of acoustic characteristics,to improve the accuracy and naturalness of English for students.