Revisiting ‘stress-deafness' amongst upper intermediate learners of English in words containing stress-imposing endings

Résumé En

While French-learners of English are said to be ‘stress-deaf’ (Dupoux et al. 1997 for Spanish; Tremblay 2009 for French Canadian learners of English), the purpose of this experiment is to measure the degree in which upper-intermediate learners of English perceive lexical stress in words of three syllables or more, the majority of which containing a stress-imposing ending, and with varying F0 patterns.Native listeners of English are known to identify lexical stress through various acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality (Fry, 1955 & 1958; Lehiste, 1976). The use of such a combination of parameters is challenging for French- speaking learners of English since French has no lexically distinctive stress and the parameters used to cue initial and final phrase accents in French are mainly duration and F0 (e.g. Jun & Fougeron, 2000; Vaissi`ere, 2002).Are French-speaking learners simply ‘stress-deaf’ and insensitive to none of the prosodic parameters, or are they sensitive to some specific cues when identifying lexical stress in English? Do they also resort to segmental parameters such as the lack of reduction in vowels, be they lexically stressed or unstressed?Tremblay (2009) highlighted the difficulty of French-speaking Canadian learners of English in ‘hearing’ stress in non-sense words in isolation (AXB test), but to our knowledge, an auditory identification experiment of English lexical stress in natural speech has not been carried out amongst French advanced learners of English (cf. Frost, 2009 for a perception of stress in disyl- labic word-pairs using synthetic speech). Nor has it been conducted in long words containing a stress-imposing ending with varying F0 patterns.During the experiment presented in this paper, 30 second-year French university students majoring in English were asked to identify the primary stress of the last word in a carrier sentence after listening to one native speaker of English (young man, General American). Each of the 46 target words was presented twice with a different tone (cf. Wells, 2006): fall, rise and fall-rise (46 × 2 × 3 = 276).Participants were asked to select the syllable bearing primary stress of a word, after hearing it in the carrier sentence. The sentence was played only once. The target word appeared on the screen in the form of segmented written syllables.The present paper focuses on the results involving the impact of stress-imposing endings. 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