Production and perception of English lexical stress patterns of Thai and Chinese speakers / Li Xinrui

Li , Xinrui (2024) Production and perception of English lexical stress patterns of Thai and Chinese speakers / Li Xinrui. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

This dissertation examines Thai and Chinese English, characterized as a variety of English that may exhibit a lack of identifiable lexical stress. Consequently, this might impact the mutual capacity to be recognized in English. There are two main experiments. Firstly, to test the differences in English acoustic features produced by Thai and Chinese L1 speakers, trisyllabic English words with controlled parts of speech obtained from the British National Corpus (BNC) were used. Analyzing the impact of various tonal languages on the lexical stress on English words by studying how Thai and Chinese L1 speakers produce and perceive speech. Praat is used to visualize the acoustic properties of 25 English words generated by four speakers from Thailand and Mainland China. Then, the production results are used as a comparison item for the perception accuracy to study the L1 language effect on L2 lexical stress perception by different language groups. Acoustic analyses of both groups’ production indicated they implemented word stress with a longer vowel duration. The stress perception results showed that both Mandarin Chinese and Thai listeners could recognize more than half of the stress positions. A careful examination of the produced acoustic data suggested that average F0 may have been responsible for their stress perception, especially in Chinese groups. The overall findings suggest strong L1 influences on the recognition of L2 English lexical stress. Meanwhile, stress familiarity and word classes also play the great role in stress perception. Further extensive acoustic research on the production and perception of stress in L2 by speakers of tonal languages will enhance our comprehension of how the prosodic system of L1 influences the learning of lexical stress in L2, resulting in a completer and more precise framework for understanding the acquisition of lexical stress across different English varieties. Future studies are needed to do a comparative analysis between the production of English non-word stimuli and real-world stimuli to fully consider the intonation influence.

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