English Stress Acquisition by Native Speakers of Tibetan

Previous studies show that language differences cause corresponding influences on Second Language Acquisition. Based on the Corpus of Chinese, English, and Tibetan spoken by Tibetan Speakers (CETTS), this study conducted English stress production and perception experiments and analyze the English stress acquisition by native speakers of Tibetan, to find out whether stress position and syllable structures will affect their stress acquisition. By analyzing 2,176 productions and 4,352 perception response by 17 subjects, as well as adopting ANOVA analysis and Mann-Whitney U test, this study finds out that: (1) The Tibetan group has a lower accuracy rate in English stress production and perception experiments; besides, unlike Americans, native Tibetan speakers do not employ the range of F0 to realize English stress. (2) Stress position affects stress production by the Tibetan group, but exerts no effect to stress production by the American group, and stress perception by both groups. (3) The tonal distribution rule of Tibetan does not affect the acquisition of English stress. (4) Schwa makes no statistical difference in accuracy rate, but can shorten the subjects' response time. Such findings will provide empirical data for more effective teaching of English to minority groups.