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investigate whether Chinese learners of English are affectedby three factors, namely, syllable structure, lexical class and phonological similarityand if the answer is yes, then how they affect Chinese learners of English.Study of this nature could provide practical information for teaching stressproduction and perception to Chinese learners of English. And there are severalreasons why acquiring a native-like accent is of importance.First, speakers’ accent reflects, though by no means always, learner’s foreignlanguage proficiency, and thus assisting language learners to acquire this prosodiccharacteristic is an indispensable responsibility for every English teacher.
In addition, the discrepancy between English, a non-tone language, andMandarin, a tone language, gives rise to the laboriousness for each learner. Mandarinspeakers often feature Mandarin rhythm while speaking English. Therefore, despitethe correctness of their pronunciation of each English word, their non-native-likeaccent hinders them from being understood easily by foreigners, which irreversiblytriggers communication barriers.Last but not least, English stress plays an indispensable role in distinguishingmeaning of the same word, such as record, desert, and minute. The meanings of thesewords hinge on whether the stress is placed on the initial position or on the finalposition.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

Notwithstanding the fact that both perception and production of segmentalcontrasts have been concentrated on much in the second language literature over thepast twenty years, only a small quantities of studies concentrating on second languagestress. Of these, most are mainly concerned with the production of second languageEnglish stress, and several studies also concentrated on the capacity of perception onstress or stress disparities by speakers of distinct mother languages. Whatinvestigations of second language stress in production do in the early times is, moreoften than not, on the basis of naturalistic or anecdotal data (Juffs, 1990, Shen, 1990),or concentrate on the performance of learners of a single native language (Anani,1989; Baptista, 1989; Wong, 1991). There are problems aroused in terms of thechoice of stimuli. The use of known words makes the probability come into being thatindividual items are merely remembered with no acquisition of a stress rule, while theuse of non-words involves issues in association with the spelling of English and theprobable resemblance of the stimuli to morphologically complicated items that aresubject to different types of stress rules. Currently, in addition to the expectedstrategy of first language transfer second stress placement, we may find, as it issuggested, strategies that take place in neither first language nor the second language.When it comes to how to perceive the stress, the latest studies started to employstructurally different non-words in highly structured experiments (Guion, 2003; 2006).One finds that properties of the first language prosodic system may play a determinantrole in deciding in what extent speakers are able to use stress information in words todistinguish members of minimal pairs (Peperkamp & Dupoux, 2002).In the following sections, the theories concerned and previous experimentalstudies in terms of the production and perception of stress will be demonstrated andanalyzed in this thesis.
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