English Stress Placement by Japanese Students : Effects of Syllable Structure and Noun-Verb Stress Differences

Abstract

Stress or accent plays an important role in the production of spoken language. Identifying the factors which affect stress placement is crucial to better understanding of how people process native and nonnative language. This study examined how Japanese learners of English deal with English word stress. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of the general noun-verb stress difference in English on stress judgment of English words by Japanese students. Experiment 2 tested the effect of syllable structure on the placement of primary stress in novel words. The results indicate that Japanese students of English have different knowledge of stress patterns between nouns and verbs and that their stress placement was influenced by vowel length, number of consonants, and the phonotactic legality of intervocalic consonants in words.