A relationship between Korean L2 learners stress placement of noun-verb homographs and English proficiency

Abstract

For Korean L2 learners, stress plays a decisive role in learning English – a stress-timed language, compared to their L1, Korean – a syllable-timed language. The accurate stress placement is important, particularly, in noun-verb homographs, which are related to the grammatical functions. This paper aims to explore whether English proficiency has a significant effect on Korean L2 learners stress placement of noun-verb homographs. A total of ten female participants conducted the stress production experiment where they were required to read sentences including the noun-verb homographs in the sentence-middle and sentence-final. Two prosodic features of stress – pitch and duration were measured in Praat. The result shows that English proficiency is not a crucial factor to the stress placement in noun-verb pairs, but reveals that the location of a word in a sentence influences the stress patterns of English.