An Experimental Study Of Southern Min Dialect Speakers' Production And Perception Of English Lexical Stress

As one of the most important suprasegmental features of English,stress plays a key role in English speech acquisition.Based on Native Language Magnet Model and Cue Weighting Theory,the current study explores the utilization of the acoustic cues by Southern Min dialect learners of English in the production and perception of English lexical stress from an acoustic dimension.English and Southern Min dialects belong to different prosody systems.English is a stress language whose acoustic cues are F0,duration and intensity at the suprasegmental level,while Southern Min is a tonal language whose acoustic cue is F0 at the suprasegmental level.As these two languages rely on different acoustic cues,Southern Min dialect learners of English may be affected by their native prosody system in their production and perception of English lexical stress.For this reason,the current study mainly explores the following questions:1.What is the difference in utilization of F0,duration and intensity in the production of English lexical stress between Southern Min learners of English and native English speakers;2.What is the relative importance of each of the three cues in the production of English stress for the two language groups;3.What is the difference in utilization of F0,duration and intensity in the perception of English lexical stress between Southern Min learners of English and native English speakers;4.What is the relative weighting of each cue in the perception of English stress for the two language groups?Production experiment and perception experiments are designed separately in this study.The production experiment includes two groups,namely Southern Min dialect group(30 subjects)and native English group(20 subjects).14 pairs of disyllabic words with contrastive stress are adopted as stimuli of the production experiment.The results indicate that: 1)in the production of English lexical stress,the stressed-to-unstressed vowel ratio of F0 produced by Southern Min dialect speakers is much higher than that by native English speakers,yet the stressed-to-unstressed vowel ratio of duration is the opposite.2)the relative importance rank of the three acoustic cue for native English speakers is: duration> F0>intensity,for Southern Min dialect speakers: F0>duration>intensity.Similarly,the perception experiment also includes two groups,with 20 subjects in each group.Two nonsense words,latmab and nitdit,are chosen for the perceptionexperiment.By normalizing and manipulating the two nonsense words,250 tokens are produced.The results indicate that: 1)in the perception of English lexical stress,Southern Min dialect speakers rely on F0 to a larger extent and duration and intensity to a lower extent than native English speakers.2)the reliance rank of the three cues for native English speakers is: F0>duration>intensity,for Southern Min dialect speakers: F0>duration>intensity.All the results indicate that Southern Min dialect learners of English are unable to combine F0,duration and intensity to produce and perceive English lexical stress due to L1 dialect transfer.This finding confirms the prediction made by Native Language Magnet Model and Cue Weighting Theory that the prosodic structure of L2 learners' L1 dialect would transfer into their production and perception of L2 stress.At the acoustic level,the transfer causes L2 learners' deviation from native speakers in utilization of acoustic cues.