A cross-linguistic study on the production of English lexical stress : reliance on language proficiency cue

Abstract EN

Stress is an important phonological feature that exists in manylanguages of the world (e.

g.

, English, Spanish, Turkish andClassical Arabic, etc.

).

It increases the articulateness andintelligibility in speech and communication mainly English asa phonemic language (Kiriakos & O'Shaughnessy, 1989).

Thisstudy examines the L2 learners‟ performance of typologicallytwo unlike languages in the production of English lexicalstress.

Iraqi Arabic and Chinese Malaysian L2 learners areincluded in the production experiment to allocate lexical stressin real and nonce words.

The results of the experimentpresented that Chinese Malaysian group realized significantlybetter than the Iraqi Arabic group in producing lexical stressand Iraqi Arabic subjects had an additional difficulty in theproduction of mismatch syllabic patterns.

After computingand controlling the language proficiency variable for bothlanguage groups, their subjects‟ mean percentage scores wereequitably alike and statistically no significant difference inperformance.

Nevertheless, the Iraqi Arabic learners werebetter at allocating stress in match syllabic patterns thanChinese Malaysian L2 learners, but the difference was alsonot significant suggesting that the chief difficulty in which L2learners come across in obtaining English lexical stress was concerning to L1 influence specifically stress patterns andtones.

The study exhibited that lexical stress difference isinflexible for L2 learners irrespective of their Stress is an important phonological feature that exists in manylanguages of the world (e.

g.

, English, Spanish, Turkish andClassical Arabic, etc.

).

It increases the articulateness andintelligibility in speech and communication mainly English asa phonemic language (Kiriakos & O'Shaughnessy, 1989).

Thisstudy examines the L2 learners‟ performance of typologicallytwo unlike languages in the production of English lexicalstress.

Iraqi Arabic and Chinese Malaysian L2 learners areincluded in the production experiment to allocate lexical stressin real and nonce words.

The results of the experimentpresented that Chinese Malaysian group realized significantlybetter than the Iraqi Arabic group in producing lexical stressand Iraqi Arabic subjects had an additional difficulty in theproduction of mismatch syllabic patterns.

After computingand controlling the language proficiency variable for bothlanguage groups, their subjects‟ mean percentage scores wereequitably alike and statistically no significant difference inperformance.

Nevertheless, the Iraqi Arabic learners werebetter at allocating stress in match syllabic patterns thanChinese Malaysian L2 learners, but the difference was alsonot significant suggesting that the chief difficulty in which L2learners come across in obtaining English lexical stress was concerning to L1 influence specifically stress patterns andtones.

The study exhibited that lexical stress difference isinflexible for L2 learners irrespective of their nativelanguages.