ERIC Number: EJ777597
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004-Dec
Pages: 20
Abstractor: Author
Reference Count: 0
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1366-7289
Early and Late Spanish-English Bilinguals' Acquisition of English Word Stress Patterns
Guion, Susan G.; Harada, Tetsuo; Clark, J. J.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, v7 n3 p207-226 Dec 2004
Guion, Clark, Harada and Wayland (2003) found that three factors affect English speakers' stress placement on bisyllabic non-words: syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of phonologically similar real words. The current replication and extension included three groups (N = 30): native English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals, and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Participants produced and gave perceptual judgments on 40 non-words of varying syllabic structures in noun and verb sentence frames. A regression analysis used the three factors to predict stress placement in production and perception. All three groups showed significant effects from stress patterns of phonologically similar real words and lexical class. The effect of syllabic structure for early bilinguals was slightly different from that of native speakers and late bilinguals showed greatly reduced effects. Late bilinguals exhibited more initial stress overall, possibly due to L1 transfer. These results run counter to the prediction made by Long (1990) about age effects on phonological acquisition.
Descriptors: Suprasegmentals, Form Classes (Languages), Native Speakers, English (Second Language), Bilingualism, Syllables, Language Research, Spanish, Regression (Statistics), Transfer of Training
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Inst. on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders, Bethesda, MD.
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers: N/A

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