earticle

영어

A foreign accent in a second language (L2) may be caused by nonnative-like pronunciation of suprasegmental elements such as stress as well as segmental elements of the L2 phonological system. In the literature of L2 phonological acquisition, however, most studies have focused on the segmental features and only a few studies have investigated the L2 acquisition of suprasegmental elements. This study examines the acquisition of English word stress by adult speakers of Korean in an attempt to see how they learn English stress patterns, particularly if they treat nouns and verbs differently and show sensitivity to the internal syllable structure with respect to stress assignment or if they treat English word stress entirely as a lexical phenomenon. For this, 51 Korean university students were assigned the production and perception tasks in which they were instructed to produce 35 monomorphemic nouns and verbs classified into 7 classes according to stress patterns and listen to them to mark on which syllable they perceived stress to be. It was revealed in this study that although they had no knowledge of stress placement associated with lexical category, vowel weight and the extramatricality of word-final consonants in English, they showed sensitivity to the effect of coda consonants, treating open and closed syllables differently. Based on the results of this research, pedagogical implications are suggested for the teaching of English word stress.