Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Let’S Stress It! Investigations Of Saudi Efl Teachers’ Lexical Stress Patterns, Mahdi Duris, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

Koffi (2019) investigated the acoustic correlates that Arabic L2 speakers of English use to encode lexical stress. This study replicates the same methodology and uses the same acoustic correlates and the same Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds. Whereas Koffi (2019) focused on a general population of Arabic speakers of English, the current study investigates how 10 females Saudi L2 speakers of English who are college professors encode lexical stress. Do they encode lexical stress similarly or differently from the group that Koffi (2019) investigated? What does this entail for the acquisition of suprasegmentals in L2 English?

The Acoustic Phonetic Correlates Of Lexical Stress In Japanese-Accented English, Ettien Koffi

Linguistic Portfolios

According to existing suprasegmental typologies, languages fall into three broad categories: accent, tone, and pitch-accent. Japanese has long been viewed as the poster child of the latter. The fact that Japanese and English (accent language) belong to two different prosodic systems raises three important questions:

1. Since Japanese is suprasegmentally different from English, can L2 speakers produce English lexical stress intelligibly?
2. Which acoustic correlate do they rely on to encode lexical stress in English?
3. Does the prosodic strategy used interfere with intelligibility?

The current study examines these issues by measuring the stress bearing units in produced by 10 Japanese L2 speakers …