The Perception Of English Lexical Stress By Mandarin And Korean Speakers

This thesis explored Mandarin speakers' and Yanbian Korean speakers'perception of English lexical stress.The previous researches found that the L2 learners who do not have lexically contrastive in their native language have difficulty in processing word-level stress in L2,as is called as the "stress deafness".For example,the French speakers had difficulty in perceiving Spanish lexical stress.English has lexical stress,whose acoustic correlates include F0,duration,intensity and vowel quality.Mandarin belongs to tonal language in which lexical identity is primarily realized by FO.Because of the existence of neutral tone,duration is the key to discriminate the stressed syllable and the unstressed syllable.while the Yanbian Korean is also considered to be a tonal language.The tonal patterns in words include the high tone(H)and the low tone(L).According to the Cue-Weighting theory of speech perception,acoustic cues signaling lexical stress are weighted differently in native language,which determines directly the degree to which the acoustic cues signaling lexical stress are weighted in the perception of second language.The Perception Assassination Model emphasizes that the L2 learners have a strong tendency to assimilate non-native sounds to a native phoneme or category which is similar in terms of its articulatory gestures.Influenced by native languages,the English learners from different language backgrounds may experience different difficulties of perception.Therefore,using the method of short-time memory in psychology,this thesis discusses the following three questions specifically,aiming to explore what the relationship is between the L2 learners' processing of English lexical stress and the weighting of individual acoustic cues signaling lexical stress in L1:1.Are there differences in encoding English lexical stress perception using the short-term memory between the Mandarin speakers and Yanbian Korean speakers?2.How do Mandarin speakers and Yanbian Korean speakers respectively weight the acoustic cues of FO and duration in perceiving English lexical stress?3.Are there any differences between Mandarin speakers and Yanbian Korean speakers in FO and duration of English lexical stress?There were two groups of subjects in the experiment:15 Mandarin speakers and 15 Korean speakers.These two groups of English Majors at the similar English proficiency level completed two perceptual tasks:the sequence-recall task.Finally,The data collected from experiments were analyzed by the General Linear Mixed-effects Models(GLMM).The major findings were given below:firstly,Mandarin speakers and Yanbain Korean speakers consistently weighted FO to a greater extent than duration;secondly,Mandarin speakers were more sensitive than Yanbian Korean speakers when they used duration cue to perceive English lexical stress;finally,there was no significant difference between the two groups when both the duration cue and the FO cue highlighted the English lexical stress.The results indicated that both Mandarin speakers and Yanbian Korean speakers use the weighting model of acoustic cues signaling lexical stress in their naive languages to perceive the English lexical stress.In addition,the results further demonstrated the performance of "stress deafness" in different language background is different.Speakers may have various degrees of difficulty depending on the characteristics of stress in their native languages.The thesis only examined the operation model of FO and duration cues signaling English lexical stress in perception of English learners.The further study will conduct a comprehensive examination of FO,duration,intensity and vowel quality cues in perception of English learners.