Stress shift: production of the acoustic parameters of stress in english by brazilian learn-ers

Carina Fragozo,
Raquel Santana Santos,
Andressa Toni
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Abstract

This paper investigates how stress shift manifests acoustically in the speech of Brazilian learners of English. The study compares different levels of proficiency versus the speech of native English speakers in three contexts: stress clash (e.g. thirTEEN MEN), no stress clash (thirTEEN baNAnas), and isolated words as control contexts (thirTEEN). Given the rhythmic and stress differences between English and Brazilian Portuguese, our goal is to observe whether Brazilian Portuguese speakers would manipulate the duration (the main acoustic cue for word stress in Portuguese) of syllables in a stress clash context in English (e.g. thirTEEN MEN, where stress can shift to the first syllable, THIRteen MEN). We analyze data of 30 Brazilian learners of English, divided into three proficiency levels (basic, intermediate and advanced), as well as data of 7 native speakers. Data classification was carried out in two phases: first a perceptual analysis and then an acoustic. The results point out that duration was manipulated by both by English learners and native speakers; that there is a statistically significant difference between the basic level and other levels; and that in contexts with an accentual cluster, both the stressed and the pretonic syllable were longer than in its counterpart in a context without an accentual cluster.

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