Awareness of L2 American English Word Stress: Implications for Teaching Speakers of Indo-Aryan Languages

This study aims to investigate the word stress placement in English and Sindhi words in learners from Indo-Aryan language and American English backgrounds. Since correct placement of word stress is key for L2 English intelligibility, and it is known that native language background affects English language learners’ word stress perception and production. The study explores English language learners’ intuition through behavioral data from the native speakers of Sindhi and American native speakers to compare their awareness of word stress in L1 and L2. It further investigates learner’s stress patterns by measuring their reports of word stress location in their Sindhi and in their L2 English. There were twenty native speakers (10 from Sindh, Pakistan-10 from Illinois State, America) who were recruited from the location in their countries. Results of three experiments show that Sindhi native speakers have less awareness of stress location in their native language than native English controls, and this effect carries into their L2 English. Teachers of Sindhi-speaking students should be prepared to provide explicit training on word stress.


Introduction
In English, word stress is contrastive, meaning that two words may differ by stress location alone i.e., the verb 'record' with the noun 'Record'.Moreover, pronunciation of English word-level stress is highly salient because reduction and co-articulation systematically distinguish stressed from unstressed syllables.In other words, English word stress modifies the meaning of English words, whereas, Sindhi word stress does not change the meaning of Sindhi words, though lexical stress is used for emphasis purpose on the words.The study investigated the intuition of both native speakers i.e., Sindhi and American as to where and how they assign primary stress on word level in their L1 and L2.American native speakers have only been judged for their L1 that is English language whereas, Sindhi native speakers were experimented for L1 and L2.

Word Stress in English
The placement of word stress is of particular importance for English language learners (ELLs) because research suggests that prosodic features such as word stress affects the intelligibility of L2 English speakers (Munro & Derwing, 1999), and native listeners 'recall […] significantly more content and evaluate […] the speaker significantly more favorably' when primary stress is correctly placed vs. incorrectly placed or missing (Hahn, 2004).Similarly, prosodic accuracy contributes to the overall impression of fluency as measured by intelligibility ratings (Derwing & Rossiter, 2003).Not only is word stress important for overall intelligibility, it is especially important for comprehending English for Academic Purposes (EAP).Longer words with Latin substrate are much more common in EAP than in everyday English.There are 39 different patterns of syllable stress in words on the widely-used Academic Word List created by Coxhead (2000), according to Murphy and Kandil (2004).Some of these patterns are rare, but mastery of the 14 most common of these patterns is required for pronunciation of 90% of the words.This task is difficult because the placement of stress is not entirely predictable in English, and therefore is difficult to teach and learn (Hammond, 1999).
The difficulty that L2 learners have in accurately producing and perceiving English stress may lie in interference effects from their L1.Prior studies have investigated transfer of word stress in fixed stress languages, or languages which are claimed to have no stress, and found robust evidence that stress patterns of a learners' L1 can interfere with their ability to accurately perceive and produce stress patterns in the target L2 (Peperkamp & Dupoux, 2002;Archibald, 1997).
Furthermore, evidence suggests that insensitivity to novel stress patterns is not necessarily due to a failure in auditory processing.Speakers of Polish (a fixed stress language) could not reliably report differing stress patterns, yet measurements of their brain activity showed evidence of a neural response to the difference between correctly stressed and incorrectly stressed syllables (Domahs, Knaus, Orzechowska, & Wiese, 2012).The transfer of stress, or the absence of stress, from the learners' native language has been shown to result in both pronunciation mistakes and decreased intelligibility (Bian, 2013).Despite the importance of stress placement for intelligibility, and the effect of L1 stress on the acquisition of novel L2 stress patterns, the question of L1 interference in L2 stress acquisition remains understudied for languages spoken outside of East Asia and Western Europe.
This paper focuses on L2 English stress acquisition by L1 speakers of Sindhi, an Indo-Aryan language.Indo-Aryan languages are an important case for L2 English stress learning because their word stress patterns are different from English, and because, as official languages of India and Pakistan, there are many adult ESL learners, many of whom learn English for Academic Purposes (EAP).

Word Stress in Sindhi
Specifying the difference between Sindhi and English word stress patterns is difficult because there is a little agreement on the phonology of Sindhi word stress.Initial analyses indicate that Indo-Aryan languages have no stress.However, the data used to draw this conclusion comes from only two languages, Hindi and Urdu, and does not include data from Sindhi (Krishnamurti et al., 1986).Jatoi (1996) analyzes Sindhi and agrees with earlier work that Sindhi has no word stress, while Nihalani (1995), on the other hand, argues that word stress does exist, and it is fixed on the first syllable of a word.Measurements of acoustic factors clarify the matter because the available evidence shows that stressed syllables are not marked acoustically in the same way that English syllables are (Abbasi & Hussain, 2015).
Data on Sindhi word stress collected by the first author (Abbasi & Hussain, 2015;Abbasi, 2017;Abbasi, Channa, Kakepoto, Ali, & Mehmood, 2017) suggest that Sindhi does have word stress, and that rather than being fixed it is weakly quantity sensitive.In a quantity-sensitive language, stress falls on so-called 'heavy' syllables, which contain a long vowel and/or a coda consonant, rather than on 'lighter' syllables with short vowels, and/or no coda consonants.If Sindhi is indeed quantity sensitive, then Sindhi stress is similar to English stress, though the measured acoustic manifestation of stress is much more robust in English.Author tested Sindhi speakers' perceptual judgments of stress location, and reports results from logistic mixed effects regression models showing that syllable weight (light vs. heavy) is a small but significant predictor of stress perception in Sindhi.Abbasi (2017) reports acoustic measurements for stress in disyllables, and shows that the acoustic difference between stressed and unstressed syllables in Sindhi is much less than it is in English.Whether Sindhi has no stress, or has a system of quantity-sensitive stress there is no question that word stress in Sindhi is phonologically distinct from that of English in the location of stress within the word, and is phonetically distinct from English in the acoustic correlates of stress.
Due to the differing typology of stress in English and in Sindhi, we are led to wonder about Sindhi speakers' awareness of word stress in English.The motivation to study stress transfer in Sindhi ELLs is threefold: (1) The phonological status of Sindhi stress is contested, and so native judgments of stress will help to confirm the status of stress in Sindhi (2) Stress transfer has been measured from East Asian languages with no stress and European languages with fixed stress, but not from Indo-Aryan languages such as Sindhi with variably placed stress that differs from English.(3) Word stress is important for English pronunciation, and there are many ELLs with a Sindhi language background.Therefore, information about Sindhi stress transfer has the potential to inform pronunciation pedagogy.

Research Questions and Predictions
In this study, two research questions are asked as follows: 1) Are there differences among Sindhi and English speakers in the awareness of stress in their native