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Title:
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The Perception and Production of Second Language Stress: A crosslinguistic experimental study
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Author:
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Heidi Altmann
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/altmann/index.htm
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Delaware
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2006
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Phonology
Psycholinguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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Arabic, Standard
Chinese, Mandarin
English
French
Japanese
Korean
Spanish
Turkish
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Director(s):
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Abstract:
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This dissertation investigates the effect of native language (L1) stress
properties on the second language (L2) acquisition of primary word stress
in light of two recent typological hierarchical models of stress: the
Stress Deafness Model (SDM) (Peperkamp & Dupoux 2002) and the Stress
Typology Model (STM) (Altmann & Vogel 2002). Since research on the L2
performance of a diverse sample of L1s with respect to both perception and
production using the same experimental design is virtually non-existent,
advanced learners of English from seven distinct L1 groups (Arabic,
Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Turkish), as well as native
English speakers participated in perception and production experiments.
Novel words of two, three, and four syllables length consisting of only
open syllables (CV) were used. In the perception experiment, subjects
listened to a large number of tokens of various structures and marked the
most stressed syllable; in the production experiment, subjects were asked
to read aloud tokens from a subset of the structures.
The results indicate that, on the one hand, learners with predictable
stress in their L1 (i.e., Arabic, Turkish, French) had problems perceiving
the location of stress but they performed most like the English native
speakers in production, who applied a frequency-based common strategy. On
the other hand, learners without word-level stress in their L1 (i.e.,
Chinese, Japanese, Korean) or with unpredictable L1 stress (Spanish) showed
almost perfect perception scores; however, their productions were quite
different from the control group’s. Thus, it was found that good
perception does not necessarily underlie good production and vice versa.
While the current findings go contrary to predictions made by the SDM, the
STM can explain both the perception as well as the production results.
Languages with predictable stress, unpredictable stress, and without stress
are included in this hierarchical model with branching parameters. It was
found that positive parameter settings impede the perception of L2 stress,
while the mere setting of the topmost parameter in the hierarchy (i.e.,
‘yes/no stress language’) and thus experience with stress in the L1
determines the rate of success in production, although L1s with
non-predictable stress face further challenges.
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