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Stress processing in Mandarin and Korean second language learners of English*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2013

CANDISE Y. LIN ,
MIN WANG ,
WILLIAM J. IDSARDI  and
YI XU
CANDISE Y. LIN*
Affiliation:
Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
MIN WANG
Affiliation:
Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
WILLIAM J. IDSARDI
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
YI XU
Affiliation:
Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, UK
*
Address for correspondence: Candise Lin, Dept of Human Development, 3304 Benjamin Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USAcandisec@umd.edu
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Abstract

This study examined stress processing among Mandarin and Korean second language learners of English and English monolinguals. While both English and Mandarin have contrastive stress at the word-level, Korean does not. Consequently, Mandarin speakers may have an advantage over Korean speakers in English stress processing, even when matched for their general English proficiency. Experiment 1 assessed participants’ stress encoding ability for nonwords in a short-term memory task. Experiment 2 examined the effect of stress in online word recognition in a lexical decision task by manipulating word frequency, stress location, and vowel quality. The results of both experiments support an advantage for English and Mandarin speakers over Korean speakers in stress processing of real words and nonwords. Only Korean speakers’ lexical judgment of nonwords was modulated by word frequency, suggesting that they do not utilize stress in lexical access. Only English speakers’ word recognition was facilitated by vowel quality changes. These results suggest that the abilities of non-native speakers to process stress in their L2 is influenced by the characteristics of the stress systems in their L1.

Keywords

stress processingsecond language acquisitioncross-linguistic influenceprosody
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 316 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The first author was supported by the NSF IGERT award DGE-9791455 to the University of Maryland. We would like to thank the five native English speakers who recorded the auditory stimuli and the Mandarin and Korean speakers who completed the pre-experimental familiarity ratings. We thank the editor, Dr. David Green, and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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