PERCEPTION OF ENGLISH LEXICAL STRESS WITH A MARKED PITCH ACCENT BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF MANDARIN

Abstract

本研究探討在有標音高語調(marked pitch accent)環境下，華語母語人士對英語詞彙重音在音韻和語音層次的感知。研究採用三項聽覺實驗，材料為重音對比的英語雙音節名詞和動詞(如：PERmit (n.) vs. perMIT (v.))。結果顯示，以華語為母語的英語學習者在無標的語境下表現與英語母語人士雷同，在有標的語境下則非如此。但較具經驗的學習者仍可區分不同重音型態，較無經驗者則無法。然而，後者仍具在語音層面上對重音的敏感度。

Three perceptual experiments were conducted to investigate the perception of English lexical stress with a marked nuclear pitch accent by native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin at the phonological and phonetic levels of processing. The stimuli were English disyllabic word pairs differing only in the position of the stress and in the morphosyntactic categories (e.g., PERmit (n.) vs. perMIT (v.)), presented for identification or discrimination. The general finding is that Mandarin-speaking learners of English performed in a native-like manner in the unmarked pitch accent context but not in the marked one. Further examination of their performance in the latter context revealed that while experienced learners failed to match the stress patterns with their morphosyntactic categories in the identification task, they could categorize them in the ABX task, which suggests that they were not phonologically deaf to stress. In contrast, inexperienced learners could not do the same, presumably deaf to stress at the phonological level. Yet, their sensitivity to both within- and across-category stress differences in the AX task indicates that they did not experience stress deafness at the phonetic level.