Seyed Mohammad Hosseini-Maasoum; Zahra Rezayee
Volume 7, Issue 12 , July 2015, , Pages 1-27
Abstract
Autosegmental-metrical (AM) phonology distinguishes two types of accents (stresses), namely: lexical accent and pitch accent. The present study offers an acoustic analysis of the prosodic feature, pitch accent, in the Persian speech of Persian speakers who are fluent in English as a second language (English ...
Read More
Autosegmental-metrical (AM) phonology distinguishes two types of accents (stresses), namely: lexical accent and pitch accent. The present study offers an acoustic analysis of the prosodic feature, pitch accent, in the Persian speech of Persian speakers who are fluent in English as a second language (English instructors). Language interference has often been dealt with as the effect of firs language on the second, but this paper deals with a reverse effect, that of the second language on the first, which has often been neglected. Thus, the accent patterns of Persian and English have been introduced and the Persian speech of Native Persian bilinguals has been analyzed from this point of view. Former studies have shown that English has leftmost accent pattern and Persian has rightmost accent pattern. The data were analyzed by means of PRAAT 5.3.71 and the accent pattern of the subjects was extracted in separate male and female groups. The results indicated a relative effect of the English accent pattern on the Persian speech of Persian bilinguals. The effect was found to be stronger in females.
