| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 98 === Within the field of L2 acquisition, relatively less attention has been paid to L2 acquisition of phonology, and even less interest has been given to the acquisition of lexical stress. However, scholars like Field (2005) has pointed out the importance of word stress since the misplacement of main stress may hinder the intelligibility of utterance and lead to miscommunication. Furthermore, though English word stress rule is not entirely predictable; it can be largely accounted for through syllable structure, word class, and phonologically similar lexicons. Among these factors, the factor of word class on stress placement is found to be more influential in English disyllabic words. This distributional property (noun-verb stress asymmetry) has also been observed in corpus study and verified in L1 and L2 empirical studies. In addition, using a comparable set of instrument in both production and perception task can help gain valuable information about English learners’ acquisition patterns; for example, in Guion’s (2005) and Lee’s (2006) study, they both found that the Korean learners’ performance on perception was generally better than production due to the interference of their L1 background. Thus, through using the same methodology in Guion et al. (2003), the present study aimed to explore Taiwanese high school students’ production and perceptual performances on the acquisition of lexical stress in using English disyllabic words as the target items.
In the present study, the effect of word class on word stress assignment was explored and the relationship between the participants’ production and perceptual performances was also investigated. Moreover, learners’ language proficiency levels and their vocabulary size on their stress performances were examined. Eighty-four 11th graders of three language proficiency levels were asked to perform the stress production and the stress perception task. The test items were twenty disyllabic nonwords of four syllable types: CVV-CVCC, CV-CVCC, CV-CVC, and CV-CVVC, and these nonwords were further embedded in meaningful sentential contexts of a verb frame and a noun frame respectively. The results indicated that the participants performed significantly better in stress perception than in stress production, and the participants’ English proficiency levels were partially related to their stress performance. That is, subjects of higher English oral proficiency performed significantly better in the stress production test. Additionally, participants’ vocabulary size was also found to be correlated with their stress production. In addition, the participants are also found to have the knowledge of English disyllabic noun-verb stress typicality. Pedagogical implications based on the research findings were also provided for English teachers and curriculum developers in EFL Taiwanese context.
|
|---|
