Acquisition of English Stress Shift by Speakers of Brazilian PORTUGUESE1 (original) (raw)
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Revista Diadorim
This is a preliminary study in which we investigate the acquisition of English as second language (L2[1]) word stress by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP, L1[2]). In this paper, we show results of a multiple choice forced choice perception test in which native speakers of American English and native speakers of Dutch judged the production of English words bearing pre-final stress that were both cognates and non-cognates with BP words. The tokens were produced by native speakers of American English and by Brazilians that speak English as a second language. The results have shown that American and Dutch listeners were consistent in their judgments on native and non-native stress productions and both speakers' groups produced variation in stress in relation to the canonical pattern. However, the variability found in American English points to the prosodic patterns of English and the variability found in Brazilian English points to the stress patterns of Portuguese. It oc...
Perceptual Training Effects on the Acquisition of English Stress by Brazilian Learners
International Journal of English Linguistics, 2017
This study investigates the effects of perceptual training on Brazilian English language learners’ ability to acquire preantepenultimate stress, or stress on the fourth to last syllable. Since preantepenultimate stress assignment is infrequent in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), it was initially hypothesized that BP speakers would store few examples of this pattern. The training was performed in five sessions and included stress identification tasks followed by immediate feedback. Results confirm the training significantly improved study participants’ perception and production of preantepenultimate syllable stress assignment. Furthermore, participants generalized acquired production patterns to unfamiliar words and retained these patterns for two months after training concluded. With frequent perceptual training, it is believed BP speakers could create a new category of English words with preantepenultimate syllable stress. This study demonstrates that perception training, typically used ...
XVth ICPhS, 2003
The aim of this paper is twofold: (a) to investigate possible differences in durational patterns within phrase stress groups contrasting stress clash vs nonclash condition, and (b) to test the assumptions of a coupled-oscillator model of speech rhythm production. Measures of duration for relevant units in isolated read sentences uttered by four subjects were statistically analyzed and tonal events were annotated. The pattern that emerges from the analyses is that of a monotonous increasing of duration of syllablesized units when approaching phrasal stress. These results contradict the Rhythm Rule and seem to indicate that no apparent, systematic, duration-related stress shift seems to take place in Brazilian Portuguese.
Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 2019
many adults who learn a second language have a foreign accent to some extent. The misproduction of lexical stress (LS), which plays an important role in the prosodic structure of speech, contributes to the perception of a heavier foreign accent. Twenty-four Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers of English of four different selfreported levels underwent tests of production and perception of LS. This study aimed to describe how production and perception of lexical stress happen to BP speakers of four different self-reported levels. Acoustic data, as well as the percentage of scores in stress placement, were collected and compared to the production of a native speaker of American English (AmE). Syllable duration, total intensity, and relative intensity were the most important parameters used by the BP speakers to stress syllables. Hits in the perception task were greater than the production task, overall. Initially stressed words had the greatest hits in both production and perception. Overall, the BP speakers from this use, in AmE, the same acoustic parameters used in BP for signaling LS. The production, in regards of acoustic parameters use, gets closer to the native when the proficiency level increases. Cognate words were not relevant in the acoustic parameters choice of the speakers, but they were relevant for the stress position hits.
Frequency as (Dis) Advantage to Word Stress Acquisition
2011
This is an initial study on the acquisition of English word stress by Brazilian Portuguese learners. The results show that incorrect productions typically had penultimate stress. This phenomenon is the focus of our present investigation. Two major factors are likely to be influencing these inaccurate productions: (i) the high frequency of penultimate stress in the firstlanguage lexicon and (ii) category assimilation of phonetic features that characterize English word stress.
Perception and Production of English Stress by Brazilian Speakers
2014
This study investigates the perception and production on the assignment of stress by 20 Brazilian speakers on English words stressed on the fourth syllable from the end. According to Brawerman (2006), which investigated only production, this pattern is difficult for Brazilian learners of English because it is an extremely rare stress pattern in their first language. The production test consisted of 40 words which were stressed on the fourth syllable from the end and 20 words which had other kinds of stress patterns and worked as distractors. The participants were recorded reading these words three times. They were also submitted to a computerized perception test designed with identification tasks which the participants listened to the words and had to click on a number corresponding to the number of the stressed syllable. Results show 85,4% of correct answers in the perception test, but 28,4% on the production test.
On the acquisition of English stress by Spanish Native Speakers
Achievements and perspectives in SLA of speech: New Sounds 2010, 2011
This paper presents the preliminary results of a case study on the acquisition of English stress by Spanish native speakers learning English as a foreign language in Mexico. The data were gathered from three tasks: a production, a perception and a repetition task. Both real and nonce words were used; these were verbs ending in the suffixes:-ate and-ise; adjectives ending in the suffix-atory and nouns ending in the suffix-ator. The analysis presented here compares the data obtained from 9 Spanish native speakers, who are all English instructors in Mexico, with the data from a control group; 12 English native speakers. The results seem to indicate that not all words are equally difficult to acquire; although the participants performed in an English-like way in the repetition task, their performance in the perception and production tasks on items containing the suffixes-atory and-ator was less satisfactory. This paper will suggest that though the L2 learners do not behave statistically in an English-like manner, the fact that they treat real and nonce forms equally may be evidence of the use of internal rules which are applied when assigning stress. A word type effect was also found with the correct production of stress in words bearing main stress in the forth or fifth syllable from the right edge being more problematic due to the stress system of the L2 learn-ers' L1.
Word stress perception in European Portuguese
Interspeech 2013, 2013
Previous research has reported stress "deafness" for languages with predictable stress, like French, contrary to languages with non-predictable stress, like Spanish ([1], [2], [3], [4]). The contrastive nature of stress appears to inhibit stress "deafness", but segmental and/or suprasegmental cues may also enhance stress discrimination ([5], [6]). In this study we carried out two experiments aiming to investigate stress perception in European Portuguese (EP), a language with non-predictable stress that utilizes duration and vowel reduction as main cues to stress. We used nonsense words that differed only in stress location, thus removing vowel reduction as a cue to stress. Experiment 1 was an ABX discrimination task ([1]). Experiment 2 was a sequence recall task ([2]). In both experiments, the stress contrast condition was compared with a phoneme control condition, in nuclear and post-nuclear position. Results of both experiments strongly suggest a stress "deafness" effect in EP. Despite its variable nature, word stress is hardly perceived by EP native-speakers in the absence of vowel reduction. These findings have implications for claims on prosodic-based cross-linguistic perception of word stress in the absence of vowel quality, and for stress "deafness" as a consequence of a predictable stress grammar.
Bootstrapping in the acquisition of word stress in Brazilian Portuguese
Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2003
This paper deals with the acquisition of word stress in Brazilian Portuguese. In the course of acquisition, children use several strategies to mark stress prominence before the adult algorithm of primary stress is used productively. I argue that the prominences found in children´s early utterances do not reflect word stress but prominences of a higher prosodic level. In other words, children use the stress information available in higher prosodic domains as a cue for the acquisition of the algorithm of primary stress.
Lexical Stress in Brazilian Portuguese in Contrast with Spanish
Speech Prosody 2014, 2014
This study discusses stress assignment in prosodic, non-verbal words in Brazilian Portuguese, in comparison with descriptions of stress assignment for Spanish [9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18]. Given the conflicting claims regarding stress assignment in Brazilian Portuguese (see [11, 1, 2, 10, 3]) there is still a need to revisit discussions on stress assignment in Portuguese. In general, stress assignment in Spanish has been explained through the interplay between the morphological and phonological domains. Similar descriptions for Portuguese still requires far more abstraction and use of artifacts than in Spanish, which makes Mattoso Câmara Jr.'s [4, 5] claim that lexical stress is unpredictable in Brazilian Portuguese surprisingly unchallenged.