Perception of English Stress by Mandarin Chinese Learners of English: An Acoustic Study By

lexical stress perception. This has traditionally been attributed to transfer of prosodic unit or settings from their first language (L1). Similarly, the problem of Chinese learners with English stress perception was assumed to arise from tonal transfer. However, little research has been devoted to the investigation of the phonetic details of second language (L2) stress perception. The present research focuses on the perception of English lexical stress by Chinese learners of English. The purpose of this study is to reveal the use of acoustic cues in stress perception by Chinese learners of English. In the experiment, F0, duration and intensity were manipulated, each with five steps, on three disyllabic nonsense words to result in a total of 375 nonsense tokens. A group of native speakers of English (NE) and a group of Chinese learners of English (CE) participated in the study and judged whether the stress i