LEXICAL STRESS ACCURACY IN ENGLISH: AN ACOUSTIC STUDY OF URDU L1 LEARNERS WITH REFERENCE TO RP NORMS
Keywords:
Acoustic, Duration, Intensity, Lexical Stress, Pitch, PRAAT, RP NormsAbstract
Lexical stress is one of the most important suprasegmental features of phonetic and phonology. It plays a crucial role in pronunciation and intelligibility. In Pakistan, a considerable problem has been seen when learners exhibit stress on English words, particularly due to the influence of their L1. Many linguists investigate the influence of L1 on ESL learners. However, there is not significant research on how Urdu L1 speakers, who are further study Urdu at higher level, produce stress on English words. This study analyzes the production of lexical stress in English by Urdu L1 learners that is investigated with reference to Received Pronunciation (RP) norms. The accuracy of stress placement is inspected with its acoustic realization by using pitch(F0), intensity and duration. The sample was taken from seven Urdu L1 speakers from the Department of Urdu from the University of Education, Lahore, Pakistan. A number of 18 targeted words extracted from the recording of four sentences read by the participants. PRAAT, the phonetic and speech software was used to examine the data. The findings highlight that Urdu learners exhibit low to high accuracy in stress placement during pronunciation. Overall accuracy rate was 46.1%. Polysyllabic words were often mispronounced and an inclination is to shift stress towards the 2nd syllable of most words. Acoustic analysis showed that learners can produce stress by greater intensity, higher pitch and most of all by longer duration. The study concludes that learners are able to realize the lexical stress but they face difficulty in synchronizing with standard English RP norms.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Hamna Tayyab, Dr. Humaira Irfan , Nayab Fatima, Zoraiz Amin Ch , Tariq Javed (Author)
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