Training Taiwanese EFL Learners to Perceive English Lexical Stress Contrast: A Pilot Study

This study investigates the effect of perceptual training on the learning of non-native lexical stress contrast. Nineteen participants who speak Mandarin or Taiwanese as their native language and have acquired English as a foreign language for an average of 7.2 years attended a perceptual training course to learn to identify English disyllabic nouns and verbs which differ only in the location of stress (e.g., pérmit (n.) vs. permít (v.)). A comparison of the L2 learners’ accuracy rates in the pretest and post-test shows (i) an increase of 33% when stress is realized in the rising intonation and (ii) a decrease of 13% when stress is realized in the falling intonation. This suggests that perceptual training is useful not only for the perception of non-native segmental contrasts and lexical tones, but also has effects, either positive or negative, on the perception of the lexical stress contrast which involves multiple phonetic correlates.