Effects Of Cantonese On English Lexical Stress Production And Perception By Cantonese Speakers

English belongs to stress language,including lexical stress and sentence stress.Stress as part of English phonetics,is of vital important in English acquisition.If learners fail to learn it well,they will get foreign accent.It's difficult for Chinese learners to acquire English stress,for Chinese is a language lack of stress.These years,there are some research about Chinese learners learning English stress,while there are few studying it from acoustic perspective,and studies exploring from dialects are even scarce.Based on this,this paper mainly focuses on effects of Cantonese on the production and perception of English lexical stress.The acoustic correlates of English lexical stress are F0,duration and intensity.Cantonese belongs to tone language,where there is no lexical stress.The main acoustic correlate is FO.There exists a big difference between the two languages in prosody system.Then what will happen to Cantonese learners of English when they produce or perceive English lexical stress?According to language transfer,L2 learners will be affected by L1.Hence,this paper will explore the following questions:1)In producing and perceiving English lexical stress,do Cantonese speakers use the three acoustic cues as English native speakers?2)What are the differences between Cantonese speakers and native English speakers in terms of using theses cues?3)Among these cues,which one do Cantonese speakers rely on most in producing and perceiving English lexical stress?To answer the above questions,two experiments are conducted:the production experiment and the perception experiment.The two experiments share the same participants:30 native English speakers and 30 Cantonese speakers.Both of the two experiments focus on the employment of three acoustic cues in English disyllabic lexical stress.The production experiment adapts the methodology from Beckman(1986)and Fry(1995,1998).The test stimuli are constructed by 14 pairs of disyllabic noun-verb pairs.These words are embedded into 28 different context sentences.Participants are required to read the sentences and the words alone,while only the latter will be used for analysis.The perception experiment uses the method of Fry(1955,1958).To avoid the interference of real words,this paper selects two nonsense words:nizdit and latmab(Wang Qian,2008).After manipulation,250 tokens are created as test stimuli.Participants are asked to listen and choose“1”if the stress falls on the first syllable,or "2" for final stress.The results of production and perception experiments exclaim that:1)Both of the participants can use F0,duration and intensity to differentiate English lexical stress;2)Cantonese speakers use more FO than native English speakers,but there is little difference in using intensity;3)Cantonese speakers rely most on FO in production and perception.Results show that,in employing the acoustic cues,Cantonese speakers behave differently from native English speakers.The reason may be that Cantonese is a tonal language,and FO is the main acoustic cue of tonal language,which has been transferred to the process of English lexical stress Acquisition.As a consequence,FO of Cantonese speakers is apparently high.