The Sensitivity of Syllable Structure in Stress Assignment of English Words by Native Speakers and Vietnamese Learners of English

• Main Authors: Le Thanh Anh Phuong, 映芳黎青
• Other Authors: Yi-Chen Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/2s583j

碩士 === 元智大學 === 應用外語學系 === 107 === This study investigated the stress placement in relation to structure of syllables in order to gain a deeper understanding of how Vietnamese learners of English assign the stress on English words as opposed to the performances of native speakers. We designed an experiment to test whether heavy syllables, those with long vowels (CVV) and those closed by a consonant (CVC), were more inclined to attract stress on penult syllalbes, as compared with light syllables, those wih short vowels (CV). Vietnamese learners of English and Naïve English speakers were recruited to participate in the experiment where the participants were to pronounce a series of three types of English words: common, rare, and made-up. The results showed that the Vietnamese learners performed slightly better on assigning the stress to the CV syllables, whereas the native speakers performed equally well on both types of syllable structure. We suggest that the preference for CV syllables by the Vietnamese learners may be because of the interference from the Vietnamese language, where words are monosyllabic, which leads to the prominence of the first syllable. Therefore we recommend the instruction of the notion of syllable weight in the teaching of pronunciation so that a better prosodic pattern may be learned