A STUDY OF SENTENCE STRESS PRODUCTION BY IRAQI ARABIC EFL LEARNERS

Abstract

Stress is an important feature in suprasegmentally phonology, the study of sounds beyond the segment. In sentence stress, stress is placed randomly due to the native speaker’s intention. The difficulty comes from many factors like L1 interference, experience, age of learning etc. as a result they might affect learners’ performance. The present study aims at the following: 1) Identifying the mean values of the acoustic factors: intensity (dB), F0 (Hz) and duration (m s) for each vowel in the given sentence. 2) Investigating the difference in the mean values of the three acoustic factors, i.e. intensity, F0 and duration between the groups of Iraqi learners and the English group of native speakers, concerning the stressed vowels. Accordingly, the following is hypothesized: L1 interference is the main cause of speakers’ English stress difference. 3) Identifying whether there is any statistical significance between F0, intensity and duration in the production of sentence stress. The results of the preceding objectives are as follows: 1) The difference between the Iraqi Arabic learners and the English native speakers is found to be not significant; even though, there are remarkable differences in vowel production. 2) There are no statistical differences in the three factors F0, intensity and duration. In conclusion, the study experimented two essential aspects L1 interference and language proficiency and it is found that both hypotheses are not true acoustically but they can be seen as active on the level of production.