English Lexical Stress Production by Native Speakers of Tibetan and Uyghur

This study studies the production of English lexical stress by native speakers of Tibetan and Uyghur, and the factors that may affect stress assignment. Thirty subjects in their twenties participated, with 10 native speakers (gender balanced) for each language, i.e. native speakers of Uyghur (NSUs), native speakers of Tibetan (NSTs) and native speakers of American English (NSAs). A total of 4,000 tokens are collected, judged and analyzed. Results indicate that: (1) Consistent with the prediction of Stress Typology Model, less negative transfer has been observed in NSTs than in NSUs in stress production. (2) Compared with NSAs, NSUs and NSTs employ different acoustic features when assigning stress. (3) Stress positions affect the accuracy of stress production by NSUs, and also the acoustic features of NSTs and NSUs when assigning stress. A speech-final lengthening effect is observed. (4) Syllable structures have little effect on the accuracy of stress production.