An Acoustic Study of English Word Stress of Amdo English Learners

Abstract

This paper analyses the mastery of English word stress of China’s Tibetan Amdo English learners, by means of acoustic phonetics. According to the “Negative Transfer” theory, as the mother language of Amdo doesn’t have word stress, this will put negative influence to the learning of English stress and their pronunciation of it will be poor. However, the result of this study shows that these learners’ grasp of English word stress is better than prediction, with an overall accuracy of 70% percent. Among the findings, two noticeable research result was discovered, which are the Amdo speakers’ pronunciation of English words with stress on the first syllable (for words with multi-syllables), compound words with stress on the first word are quite problematic, and these speakers has no awareness of “stress shift”. These findings are very helpful to Amdo English learners and their eachers and could be further used in pedagogy designs.