A Typological Study on Perception of English Lexical Stress

The present study, from the perspective of linguistic typology, uses Cue weighting Theory as the theoretical foundation to study the perception of English lexical stress by native speakers of stress language, tone language and pitch accent language, in terms of pitch, duration, intensity and vowel quality. The aim of present study is to reveal the influence of native prosody types on the perception of English lexical stress, by using a identification task. The results indicated that native speakers and L2 learners weighed pitch cues similarly in lexical stress perception, however, they differed significantly in the weight of vowel quality and duration cues. For L2 learners, Mandarin speakers weighted vowel quality and duration cues more similarly to native speakers, and they weighted the two cues heavier, compared to Korean Chinese. This study provides the data support for the Language Transfer Theory, tests Cue-weighting Theory, in order to provide implications for L2 phonetic teaching and learning.