French Learners of L2 English: Intonation Boundaries and the Marking of Lexical Stress

To test my hypothesis, I collected passages of read speech by thirteen upper intermediate/advanced French learners of English along with the same passage read by ten native English speakers. Two trisyllabics carrying primary stress on the second syllable (com'puter, pro'tection) were placed in a series of intonational contexts under observation. The test-words were then extracted and submitted to native English listeners. The perceptual results show that the predicted ‘challenging’ contexts indeed caused substantial instability in the learners’ placement of lexical stress as perceived by native English listeners