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http://dx.doi.org/10.13064/KSSS.2018.10.1.015

Acoustic analysis of English lexical stress produced by Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese-Chinese speakers  

Jung, Ye-Jee (Department of English Language and Literature Yonsei University)
Rhee, Seok-Chae (Yonsei University)
Publication Information
Phonetics and Speech Sciences / v.10, no.1, 2018 , pp. 15-22 More about this Journal
Abstract
Stressed vowels in English are usually produced using longer duration, higher pitch, and greater intensity than unstressed vowels. However, many English as a foreign language (EFL) learners have difficulty producing English lexical stress because their mother tongues do not have such features. In order to investigate if certain non-native English speakers (Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese-Chinese native speakers) are able to produce English lexical stress in a native-like manner, speech samples were extracted from the L2 learners' corpus known as AESOP (the Asian English Speech cOrpus Project). Sixteen disyllabic words were analyzed in terms of the ratio of duration, pitch, and intensity. The results demonstrate that non-native English speakers are able to produce English stress in a similar way to native English speakers, and all speakers (both native and non-native) show a tendency to use duration as the strongest cue in producing stress. The results also show that the duration ratio of native English speakers was significantly higher than that of non-native speakers, indicating that native speakers produce a bigger difference in duration between stressed and unstressed vowels.
Keywords
English lexical stress; stressed/unstressed English vowels; prosody; foreign-accented speech;
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