Perceptual Training Effects on the Acquisition of English Stress by Brazilian Learners

Abstract

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 for the perception or the production of sounds, can also be used to improve the production of L2 stress assignment with very positive results.

Acoustic Manifestation of English Lexical Stress Pattern by Native Erei Speakers

“…Brawermann-Albini and Becker (2014, cited in Mehler, Jusczyk, Lambertz, Halsted, Bertocini & Amie-Tison 1988 suggest that L2 learners should learn the L2 prosody before they learn the individual segments if they should communicate intelligibly. They further argue that at adult age, it is usually very difficult to adjust the perception and production mechanism, and therefore L2 learners will definitely find it difficult to produce and perceive the target language accurately.…”

“…Brawerman- Albini and Becker (2014) demonstrate that L2 adult speakers have continuously struggled to produce certain sounds of the target language, especially the prosodic elements particularly because of the difficulty they have to produce contrasts of an L2 which are not distinctive in their first language (L1) in an appropriate way. They report that L2 learners usually identify L2 sounds with L1 sounds even when both are acoustically different, making them to substitute their L1 sounds for the target language during the process of articulation.…”