Immediate and long-term improvement in lexical stress perception: the role of teacher and peer feedback

This study investigated to what extent teacher and peer feedback promote L2 lexical stress perception skills and how gains are maintained over time. Eighty-two participants from 11 sections of first-year German courses at three universities were assigned to a teacher feedback group, a peer feedback provider group, a peer feedback receiver group, or a control group. After completing a pronunciation training on word stress in German–English cognates, the teacher group received feedback on their pronunciation from a teacher, the provider group gave feedback to peers, and the receiver group received feedback from peers. The control group did not complete the pronunciation training or receive feedback. Results comparing learners’ pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest perception accuracy revealed that the teacher group and the provider group made significant gains in terms of their ability to perceive word stress in cognates, whereas the receiver group and the control group showed no improvement.

An Argument for Phonological Stress in French: the syntagm over contrast

It is standardly assumed that French does not have word-stress, rather it has phrase-level prominence. I will advance a number of arguments, many of which have appeared already in the literature, that cumulatively suggest that French roots are characterized by phonological prominence, even if this is non-contrastive. By prominence, I mean a syntagmatically distributed strength that has all the phonological characteristics of stress in other Romance languages. I will remain agnostic about the nature of that stress, eschewing the lively debate about whether French has feet, and if so what type, and at what level. The structure of the argument is as follows. French demonstrably has phonological word-final strength but one wonders what the source of this strength is. Positionally, the initial position is strong and, independently of cases where it is reinforced by other factors, the final position is weak. I will argue, based on parallels with other Romance languages, that French word-final strength derives from root-final phonological stress. The broader significance of this conclusion is that syntagmatic properties are enough to motivate underlying forms, even in the absence of paradigmatic contrasts (minimal pairs).

A study on the relationship between musical ability and EFL pronunciation proficiency

This study investigates the relationship between musical ability and pronunciation proficiency of English as a foreign language [EFL] of university students of English philology. English pronunciation of the participants is evaluated by academic teachers of English in three categories: the general impression of the foreign or native accent, the accuracy of production of English sounds and the use of word stress and intonation. This experiment was conducted entirely online. Participants’ musical ability was tested using Gordon’s Advanced Measure of Music Audiation [AMMA]. The results of this study demonstrate a moderately positive correlation between musicality and FL pronunciation proficiency. The more musical students, the higher marks from the judges. The present findings seem to be consistent with other studies which suggest that musical skills may positively affect the acquisition of foreign language pronunciation.

Erroneous Word-Stress Patterns Used by EFL Yemeni Learners

This experimental study aims at investigating the English word-stress patterns used by Yemenis, learning English as a foreign language, and the erroneous stress patterns used by them. Accent or stress is a feature of high significance in English speech. At the level of a word, one syllable gets accentuated with primary stress. To achieve the purpose of this study, and to find out to what extent word stress of Received Pronunciation English poses difficulty on Yemeni Arabic speakers using English as a foreign language, 120 subjects of various scientific disciplines, were chosen for data collection. They were recorded and their utterances went through deep analysis based on the auditory impression of the researcher and on the spectrographic evidence resulting from the speech analysis of the software program PRAAT. The most significant findings reached by the researcher were that word-stress in the four-syllable target words were the most problematic for the speakers in which 53.2% of them put the stress, randomly, on the wrong syllables in words. Three-syllable target words appeared to be less problematic as 44.4% of the participants placed the stress inaccurately in words. The least difficulties encountered by the speakers were with the two-syllable target words where 70.6% of the speakers managed to pronounce the words with correct stress placement. It is noteworthy to mention that there was a tendency among the speakers who produced wrong stress patterns, to accent either the first syllable or the one including a long vowel or a diphthong in the words.

Word Stress in Qassimi Arabic: A Constraint-Based Analysis

This study aimed to produce a formalism of word stress in Qassimi Arabic (QA), which is a sub-dialect of Najdi Arabic (NA), using a constraint-based approach. To this end, this paper investigated two main topics: The first topic explored word stress in QA. Word stress in QA, as well as in NA, is predictable; it can be determined by syllable weight and position. However, two cases do not conform to such straightforward stress rules. These cases are represented by the words: [ʔal.ʕa.sˤir] ‘afternoon’ and [ʔa.ʕa.rif] ‘I know’. Derivational analysis of these exceptions shows the importance of relating the surface structures of such forms to their underlying representations. The second topic aimed to make a formalism for stress patterns in QA using optimality theory (OT). Thus, QA word stress rules and their exceptions are translated into conflicting constraints that are ranked relative to one another by the use of constraint-relation tableaux. This ranking eventually produced the following constraint-relation hierarchy: Lx≈Pr, SYLLABLE-INTEGRITY, TROCHAIC, FAITH-PK >> NONFINAL >> *[ʔa. >> FTBIN-µ, WSP, ALL-FEET-RIGHT >> MAIN-RIGHT, PARSE-σ.

“One of us”

While scholars have explored the importance of quoting media in accomplishing relationship and identity work in conversation, there is little work on how people actually phonetically and paralinguistically signal media references in the speech stream. This chapter demonstrates how speakers make 148 media references recognizable across five audio-recorded everyday conversations among Millennial friends in their late twenties. Five ways that media references are signaled in talk are identified: word stress and intonation, pitch shifts, smiling and laughter, performing stylized accents, and singing. This systematic analysis of the contextualization cues used to signal media references in everyday talk contributes to understanding how speakers participate in intertextual processes. This chapter also introduces how signaling playful media references often (but not always) serves to negotiate epistemic, or knowledge, imbalances as well as interactional dilemmas, or awkward and unpleasant moments in interaction; this will be explored in more detail in chapters 4 and 5. Also weaved in are analyses of the identity work being constructed with the media references, as well as of the media stereotypes that are repeated in some of them.

Deviations in Mastering the Word Stress by Medical Students from other Slav Countries and Approaches to their Overcoming

The current article represents some research in the drawbacks and violations of placing the correct word stress by foreign students, coming from other Slav countries, while reading in a loud voice. What is being analyzed is the pedagogical observation as well as the statistical public inquiry that took place between 2017 and 2021 among 54 M.Sc. students from the Department of Medicine at The Medical University – Pleven. All relevant data, based on the research work, differentiate into subcategories the fluctuations in the application of the accent norm. The results from the priority arrangement as regards the five factors, having an impact on the correct oral output, have been summarized according to their difficulty rate from 1st to 5th grade. In the teaching programme, the necessity for distinct accent rules and regulations has been duly reasoned. It is very important, within each and every module, for one to offer additional lexico-grammatical exercises and phonological assignments which could facilitate teaching the Bulgarian word stress and automate its precise use in the verbal communication for medical purposes.

San’ani Arabic Stress in Harmonic Serialism

The word stress system in San’ani Arabic exhibits patterns of stress placement that associate some level of prominence with syllables with long vowels and syllables that end in the left-leg of a geminate. The fact that such syllables always succeed in attracting stress away from other non-final CVC syllables, even beyond the final trisyllabic window, clearly indicates the role that underlying moraicity plays in the stress algorithm. The proposed account, offered in this paper for the word stress system in San’ani, is couched in Harmonic Serialism, as a serial version of Optimality Theory. Key to the analyses presented is the assumption of gradual prosodification. The distinction drawn between faithful and unfaithful prosodic operations allows for applying some in a parallel fashion, but confines others to serialism. Central to the analysis, as well, is the exceptional case of final stress, which is mainly attributed to the intrinsic prominence of syllables with underlying bimoraic sequences.

The perception of word stress cues in Papuan Malay: a typological perspective and experimental investigation.

Analyses of word prosody have shown that in some Indonesian languages listeners do not make use of word stress cues. The outcomes have contributed to the conclusion that these languages do not have word stress. The current study revisits this conclusion and investigates to what extent speakers of Papuan Malay, a language of Eastern Indonesia, use suprasegmental stress cues to recognize words. Acoustically, this language exhibits predictable word level prominence patterns, which could facilitate word recognition. However, the literature lacks a crucial perceptual verification and related languages in the Trade Malay family have been analysed as stressless. This could be indicative of either regional variation or different criteria to diagnose word stress. To investigate this issue, the current study reviews the literature on which criteria were decisive to diagnose (the absence of) word stress in Indonesian and Trade Malay. An acoustic analysis and a gating task investigate the usefulness of Papuan Malay stress cues for word recognition. Results show that Papuan Malay listeners are indeed able to use suprasegmental stress cues to identify words. The outcomes are discussed in a typological perspective to shed light on how production and perception studies contribute to stress diagnosis cross-linguistically.