Phonological Realization of English Lexical Stress Placement by Native (L1) Bengali Speakers (original) (raw)

— English lexical stress is multidimensional in nature and acoustically related to combination of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Current study investigates the acquisition of English lexical stress by L1 Bengali speakers at phonological level. This study compares 20 L1 Bengali speakers' use of acoustic correlates for production of English lexical stress in context sentence and neutral frame sentence. Result of this study showed that L1 Bengali speakers were not able to achieve neutral frame sentence like control over duration, intensity, F0 and to a limited extent vowel quality in context sentence. This experiment reveals that due to the influence of Bengali phonology of lexical stress placement (restricted to the initial syllable of a word) on L1 Bengali speakers' English speech, L1 Bengali speakers were not sensitive to contrastive stress pattern in context sentence, unlike neutral frame sentence.