Nuclear stress placement by Brazilian Users of English as an International Language

Abstract

Research has revolved around the pronunciation features that are important to guarantee speech intelligibility by users of English as an international language (IL). In light of the importance of nuclear stress placement for successful communication among speakers in the international community (Jenkins, 2000), the present study investigated the way nuclear stress is placed by four Brazilian Portuguese (BP) intermediate users of English when interacting with other BP users of English (as listeners). Participants met in pairs and engaged in a controlled pairwork oral task, which yielded the production of 160 audio-recorded utterances. With the use of Praat, perceptual and acoustic analysis of the dataset were performed in order to examine if nuclear stress was placed as expected according to the discursive contexts set. The analysis revealed that speakers had difficulties in placing the expected nuclear stress at sentence initial, medial, and, surprisingly, final position. Additionally, it was found that for the participants in the present study, signaling both corrective information and information being elicited by means of nuclear stress placement was challenging. This difficulty in placing nuclear stress may compromise the way these speakers’ intent is interpreted when holding interactions in English.

Keywords

• International Language
• Nuclear stress
• Communication
• Pronunciation.