Gender Influence on the Pronunciation of Stress by Iraqi and Kurdish EFL Learners

Abstract

Stress is one of the main linguistic aspects that deals with greater effort on a syllable or syllables in a word and making them more prominent than other unstressed syllables. This phonetic and phonological feature is probably present in most languages of the world. The present study presents lexical stress patterns influence on Iraqi Arabic and Kurdish EFL learners’ pronunciation.  The study aims at investigating EFL learners’ pronunciation of English lexical stress by three different language groups, to show the effect of first language on the pronunciation of English words concerning Iraqi Arabic and Kurdish EFL learners, clarifying the influence of gender on their performance. The current study hypothesizes the following for the current aim to be achieved: . there is no difference in gender in the performance of all language groups. Lastly, the validity of the data is analyzed acoustically by using Praat software program to verify the auditory analysis and to make certain that stress assignment is precise. Among the conclusions arrived at in the present study is that the total performance of Kurdish participants is better than the Iraqi Arabic performance, but there is no significant difference between them.