THE ACOUSTIC ANALASIS OF SENTENCE STRESS BY IRAQI EFL LEARERS BBASED ON GENDER DIFFERENCES

Abstract

Sentence stress is a really complicated field of English pronunciation and it is intertwined carefully with rhythm and intonation. As a group they are named the prosody of speech.  The present study aims at the following: 1) Investigating the difference in the mean values, of intensity, F0 and duration, in the production of stressed and unstressed words in a given sentence, among the Iraqi groups. 2) Identifying whether there is any statistical significance between F0, intensity and duration in the production of sentence stress. 3) Identifying gender differences between the British native speakers and the Iraqi Arabic learners regarding the three acoustic factors. The results of the preceding aims are as follows: 1) In spite of the different levels of the Iraqi groups and their different levels of language proficiency, yet the difference among the four groups is deemed to be not significant. 2) There are no statistical differences in the three factors F0, intensity and duration. 3) There are observable differences in gender between the Iraqi groups and the English native speakers’ group but it is not significant.   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.