Identification and Discrimination of Word Stress by Taiwanese EFL Learners

This paper investigates Taiwanese EFL learners’ identification and discrimination of English word stress when the cue of pitch is manipulated. Forty Taiwanese EFL learners and twenty English controls participated in two perceptual experiments. In Experiment 1, the participants were asked to identify a perceived non-word when its stressed syllable was realized phonetically either (a) in higher pitch, or (b) in a low rising pitch contour. In Experiment 2, they were asked to discriminate a given paired stimuli with either identical or different stress pattern(s). The results show that while all of the subjects had little difficulty in identifying word stress in the condition (a), they all had great difficulty in doing so in the condition (b). However, these subjects showed substantial sensitivity to stress differences in the condition (b) and their perception was psycho-acoustically based whereas the English native controls’ was more categorical. The findings suggest that Taiwanese speakers are still sensitive to the stress variations of English in spite of the lack of lexical stress contrasts in Taiwanese Mandarin.