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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Purpose of the Study
The native speakers hear is only concerning the production end of the secondlanguage acquisition; nevertheless, it is not self-evident what second languagelearners are actually capable to produce and perceive when they have full access tothe second language, either in the classroom or in a naturalistic second languageenvironment. Due to the fact that the perception of stress was found not to correlatewith proficiency in other respects of second language (Boyle 1987), seemingly,otherwise learners with high language proficiency may still be confronted withproblems with the production and perception of word stress. As a mark of how huge achallenge stress brings about for second language learners and instructors, noteworthyis the fact that several teaching methodologies have been advanced specifically tocatalyze the process of acquiring second language stress pattern (Rosse 1999, Jamesand Sherk 1993).Little is known about typological factors that may play a pivotal role in thesuccess of second language acquisition of stress. While ostensibly it is apparent thatthe first language exerts some impacts on the rate of success in acquiring stress in thesecond language, it is still not evident which stress properties of the native languageactually exert effects on L2 acquisition. To be more accurate, the rate of success ofperceiving stress differences , based on the finding of Peperkamp and Dupoux (2002),decreases as the regularity of stress assignment increases in the native language. Interms of the production of L2 words, learners may use a native stress placementstrategy to the second language (Archibald 1993), or they might yield stress in a placewhich it would neither belong to the native nor to the second language (Archibald1997, Pater 1997).
In this study, an investigation was conducted in the light of Critical PeriodHypothesis and Typological models to check three factors, which have been used byGuion et al (2003; 2005; 2006) in his study, affecting the acquisition of English wordstress pattern of Chinese learners of English. The investigation was based on threeexperiments, the participants of which are 10 Chinese Senior High-school studentsand 10 College students. The results of the three experiments may shed lights on theresearch on acquisition of English stress placement of Chinese learners of English.
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1.2 Significance of This Study
Although a multitude of previous researches have been conducted to examine theproduction and the perception of second language (L2) consonants and vowels byadult L2 learners over the past several decades, recently, there has been a growinginterest in investigating the acquisition of word stress as part of the L2 prosodicsystem by adult L2 learners. The recent study conducted by Ratee Wayland in 2006suggested that speakers of non-stress languages may hinge more heavily onword-by-word learning of stress patterns and are less likely to abstract generalitiesabout stress placement using syllabic structure or lexical class than speakers of stresslanguages, since tone is a lexical property and thus has to be acquired by item by item.Hence an assumption was proposed by Wayland that native speakers of other tonelanguages including Mandarin Chinese would use a similar approach when acquiringthe English stress pattern.This study aims to本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。