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Esl Speakers' Production Of English Lexical Stress: The Effect Of Variation In Acoustic Correlates On Perceived Intelligibility And Nativeness, Paul Edmunds

Linguistics ETDs

Non-native speakers of English often experience problems in pronunciation as they are learning English, many such problems persisting even when the speaker has achieved a high degree of fluency. Research has shown that for a non-native speaker to sound most natural and intelligible in his or her second language, the speaker must acquire proper prosody, such as native-like speech rhythms (Tajima et al., 1997; Wenk, 1985; Wennerstrom, 2001). This dissertation investigates how native English and Spanish ESL (English as a Second Language) speakers compare in their production of three acoustic correlates of lexical stress in English, namely the relative durations …