The Role of Chinese EFL Learners' Sensitivity to English Lexical Stress Patterns in Grammatical Category Assignments

Abstract

本研究探討臺灣英語學習者是否能不透過直接教學，意識到英語語料中名、動相對詞超音段音位(重音)的轉換，進而運用超音段音位上的轉換將英語詞彙分派到適當的句法位置。六十名臺灣六年級學童和四十名臺灣大學生參與一項英語名動重音轉換學習作業。這項學習作業以假字為語料，包含四次學習及四次檢驗，假字置於不同的英語承載句中，提供辨別假字詞性的線索。半數的受試者學習到的假字重音轉換與英語名動詞性的轉換相關；半數的受試者學習到的假字，其重音轉換與詞性轉換無關。研究結果發現當語料的重音變化與詞性相關峙，臺灣大學生能運用名、動相對詞的重音轉換來決定假字的詞性。六年級學童只有在某些分析中顯現英語名、動相對詞重音敏成度。然而，不論是大學生或是六年級學童，都無法將所學之名、動相對詞之重音規則應用於新詞的學習。上述結果顯示，在沒有直接或明確的指導下，運用語料中的超音段音位(重音)做為新詞學習的線索，對臺灣英語學習者而言，是一項緩慢發展的歷程。

This study investigated whether Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, in the absence of ostensive instruction, were sensitive to English suprasegmental patterns (i.e. , stress) and exploited the patterns to solve the problem of grammatical category assignment in lexical learning. 60 sixth graders and 40 college students participated in a multi-trial English noun-verb stress alternation task, in which the alternation of stress between nouns and verbs was exemplified in carrier sentences over four learning trials in two conditions. In the consistent condition, the stress pattern of nouns and verbs matched English and was consistent across the exemplars. In the independent condition, there was no predictable relationship between stress pattern and grammatical categories. Results showed that Chinese EFL college students extracted the alternation pattern from the experimental input and assigned a pseudoword to a noun or a verb accordingly; sixth graders demonstrated some emerging sensitivity to the correlation between stress pattern and grammatical categories, but their sensitivity was not robust in all analyses. Neither college students nor sixth graders generalized their stress sensitivity to new pseudowords. The findings suggest that exploiting suprasegmental cues to grammatical assignment in English is a slow and protracted process among Chinese EFL learners and can hardly be mastered in the absence of direct and explicit instruction.