The perception of English lexical stress by native Thai speakers.

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of L1 stress patterns and stress cues on the perception of L2 lexical stress. Thai and English were examined due to their prosodic differences such as the stress pattern and native perceptual correlates of stress. Thai, being a tone language, has a fixed stress pattern and employs the duration contrast as the primary stress cue. In contrast, English has a variable stress pattern and employs a combination of acoustic cues such as F0, duration, intensity contrast, and vowel reduction. Perceptual difficulties by listeners from a fixed-stress background have been reported in L2 stress discrimination and identification tasks. In this study, two groups of listeners, 35 Thai and 10 American English (AE), identified the stress location of disyllabic English nonwords produced by a trained phonetician using the above stress cues except vowel reduction. The preliminary results show similar mean scores between the two groups with a bias toward initial stress in misidentified tokens by AE listeners. Further analysis will report the reaction time analysis and the interaction between the syllabic structure and stress location.