Prosodic transfer in Vietnamese acquisition of English contrastive stress patterns

This paper reports a study of prosodic transfer effects in the production and perception of three English stress patterns (broad-focus noun phrase, narrow-focus noun phrase and compound) at the level of word and phrase prosody by Vietnamese learners of English. The experiments examined the acoustic features and the perceptual strategies that native Australian English speakers and different groups of non-native speakers (Vietnamese beginning learners and advanced speakers of English) use to distinguish the three stress patterns. The results showed that native speakers and non-native speakers differ in their use of acoustic patterns which are optimally suited to their respective first language phonologies for realizing the three English stress patterns. Native speakers of English employed a combination of syntagmatic f0 (and correlated intensity) contrasts and duration in distinguishing the three stress patterns. Vietnamese speakers had no problem in manipulating contrastive levels of f0 and intensity on accent-bearing syllables but failed to realize the timing contrast between compound words and phrases and the syntagmatic contrast of accent in larger units such as polysyllabic words or phrases, as evidenced by their failure to deaccent the second element of the compound and narrow-focus patterns. Nevertheless, the advanced speakers’ ability to compress the constituents of the compounds and to deaccent the final nouns shows the effect of language learning/experience on prosodic acquisition. Possible mechanisms that underlie the transfer effects involved in three stress patterns are also discussed.