An Acoustic Study Of Southern Min Speakers' Production Of English Lexical Stress

Acoustically,English lexical stress is multidimensional,involving fundamental frequency(F0),intensity and duration.Lack of a mastery of any of these correlates could interfere with the perception and production of the English lexical stress.As a tone language,F0 plays a significant role in Southern Min(SM)dialect,which also has a final stress pattern.By measuring the FO,intensity and duration in the English lexical stress production by the Southern Min dialect speakers and then comparing the result with that of native English speakers,this thesis mainly examined the production of English lexical stress by Southern Min dialect speakers.According to the theory of language transfer,native language is likely to impact second language learners in the process of learning.However,the research on how the learners' native dialect influences the production of English lexical stress is scarce.The present study addresses the following research questions:1)In producing English lexical stress,do Southern Min dialect learners of English utilize the three acoustic correlates,F0,intensity and duration?2)What are the differences between English native speakers and Southern Min dialect learners of English in their use of F0,intensity and duration?3)How does Southern Min dialect affect the production of different stress patterns of English lexical stress?The participants in this study were divided into two groups:one group was composed of 16 native English speakers;another group 16 Southern Min dialect speakers.Both groups consisted of 8 male and 8 female.The average age of native English speakers was 28 and that of Southern Min dialect speakers was 20.All SM dialect speakers are non-English majors in Hunan University.14 pairs of disyllabic words were selected as stimuli used in this experiment.Each word pair consisted of a noun and a verb that had identical spelling forms and differed only in terms of stress placement.There are 28 target words in total and each target word had the corresponding carrier sentence.The paper measured the pitch,intensity and duration of vowels in stressed syllables and unstressed syllables,respectively.The results of this paper are given below:1)In producing English lexical stress,SM speakers did utilize the three acoustic correlates,FO,intensity and duration.2)SM speakers relied more on pitch while native English speakers relied more on duration.The major reason is that SM dialect is a tone language,in which pitch plays a major role.3)Since SM dialect shows final-stress pattern,SM dialect speakers employed the three acoustic correlates to a larger extent in verbs than in nouns.Especially the employment of pitch,the differences between the nouns and verbs were significant.The results above suggested that influenced by their native language,SM dialect speakers showed different manner of using the acoustic correlates,resulting in nonstandard pronunciation of English lexical stress.