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Revisiting ‘stress-deafness' amongst upper intermediate learners of English in words containing stress-imposing endings

Résumé

While French-learners of English are said to be ‘stress-deaf’ (Dupoux et al. 1997 for Spanish; Tremblay 2009 for French Canadian learners of English), the purpose of this experiment is to measure the degree in which upper-intermediate learners of English perceive lexical stress in words of three syllables or more, the majority of which containing a stress-imposing ending, and with varying F0 patterns. Native listeners of English are known to identify lexical stress through various acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality (Fry, 1955 & 1958; Lehiste, 1976). The use of such a combination of parameters is challenging for French- speaking learners of English since French has no lexically distinctive stress and the parameters used to cue initial and final phrase accents in French are mainly duration and F0 (e.g. Jun & Fougeron, 2000; Vaissi`ere, 2002). Are French-speaking learners simply ‘stress-deaf’ and insensitive to none of the prosodic parameters, or are they sensitive to some specific cues when identifying lexical stress in English? Do they also resort to segmental parameters such as the lack of reduction in vowels, be they lexically stressed or unstressed? Tremblay (2009) highlighted the difficulty of French-speaking Canadian learners of English in ‘hearing’ stress in non-sense words in isolation (AXB test), but to our knowledge, an auditory identification experiment of English lexical stress in natural speech has not been carried out amongst French advanced learners of English (cf. Frost, 2009 for a perception of stress in disyl- labic word-pairs using synthetic speech). Nor has it been conducted in long words containing a stress-imposing ending with varying F0 patterns. During the experiment presented in this paper, 30 second-year French university students majoring in English were asked to identify the primary stress of the last word in a carrier sentence after listening to one native speaker of English (young man, General American). Each of the 46 target words was presented twice with a different tone (cf. Wells, 2006): fall, rise and fall-rise (46 × 2 × 3 = 276). Participants were asked to select the syllable bearing primary stress of a word, after hearing it in the carrier sentence. The sentence was played only once. The target word appeared on the screen in the form of segmented written syllables. The present paper focuses on the results involving the impact of stress-imposing endings. Participants tended to select the stress either at the beginning of the word or at the end, re- gardless of the presence of a stress-imposing ending. Unreduced unstressed vowels (diphthongs) towards the end of the word seem to be interpreted as a cue for lexical stress amongst partici- pants. Such results suggest the importance to go beyond the opposition between reduced and unreduced vowels in the identification and production of unstressed / stressed syllables, especially in words deriving from French-Latin, which are more likely to be used by advanced French learners of English in an academic context. References Archibald, J. (1997). The acquisition of English stress by speakers of nonaccentual languages: lexical storage versus computation of stress. Linguistics, 35(1), 167-182. https://doi.org/10.151 5/ling.1997.35.1.167 Archibald, J. (2005). Second Language Phonology as Redeployment of L1 Phonological Knowl- edge. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne De Linguistique, 50(1-4), 285-314. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100003741 Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastian, N. & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing ‘deafness’ in French? Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 406–421. Frost, D. (2009). The Perception of Word Stress in English and French: Which cues for native English and French speakers? EPIP1 (English Pronunciation: Issues and Practices), Universit ́e de Savoie, Chamb ́ery, France, 57-73. Frost, D. (2010). La surdit ́e accentuelle : d’ou` vient-elle et comment la gu ́erir ? Les Cahiers de l’APLIUT, APLIUT, 2010, Phon ́etique, phonologie et enseignement des langues de sp ́ecialit ́e - Volume 1, 24 (2), 25-43. Fry, D. B. (1955). Duration and intensity as physical correlates of linguistic stress. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 27(4), 765-768. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1908022 Fry, D. B. (1958). Experiments in the Perception of Stress. Language and Speech, 1(2), 126–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/002383095800100207 Jun, S.-A. & Fougeron, C. (2000). A phonological model of French intonation. In A. Botinis (Ed.), Intonation: Analysis, modelling, and technology, 209–242. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Lacabex, E. G., Lecumberri, M. L. G., & Cooke, M. (2007). Perception of English vowel reduc- tion by trained Spanish learners. In New Sounds 2007: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech, 293-299. Lehiste, I. (1976). Influence of fundamental frequency pattern on the perception of duration. Journal of Phonetics, 4, 113–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0095-4470(19)31231-8 Tremblay, A. (2009). Phonetic variability and the variable perception of L2 word stress by French Canadian listeners. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13, 35–62. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1367006909103528 Vaissi`ere, J. (2002). Cross-linguistic prosodic transcription: French vs. English. In N. B. Vol- skaya, N. D. Svetozarova & P. A. Skrelin (eds.). Problems and methods of experimental phonetics. In honour of the 70th anniversary of Pr. L. V. Bondarko, St Petersburg State University Press, 147-164. Wells, J. C. (2006). English Intonation: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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hal-04376152 , version 1 (06-01-2024)

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Takeki Kamiyama, Maelle Amand. Revisiting ‘stress-deafness' amongst upper intermediate learners of English in words containing stress-imposing endings. PAC 2023 - Spoken English varieties: interfaces and multidimensional approaches, Hugo Chatellier; Ivana Didirková; Marie-Pierre Jouannaud; Takeki Kamiyama; Cécile Viollain, Apr 2023, Nanterre, France. ⟨hal-04376152⟩
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