Chinese learners’ acquisition of English word stress and factors affecting stress assignment

This study explores Chinese ESL learners’ acquisition of English word stress and compares the factors affecting their stress assignment with Guion et al.’s (2003) findings of three factors (syllable structure, lexical class, and phonologically similar words) affecting English speakers’ stress placement. Twenty Hong Kong advanced learners produced and perceived 40 real words and 40 pseudowords of varying syllable structures in noun and verb sentence frames. They also indicated words they considered to be phonologically similar to the pseudoword. The results show that the participants performed well in the tasks with real words, but there were asymmetrical abilities in the tasks involving pseudowords. Regarding the factors affecting the stress assignment, different from the findings by Guion et al., stress assignment was not significantly influenced by syllable structure or the stress patterns of phonologically similar real words. Only lexical class had an effect on main stress assignment. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.