LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:8 August 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Influence of Stress Pattern of Native Language on Non-Native Language:
A Comparative Study between Tone and Non-Tone Language Speakers

Narasimhan. S.V., M.Sc. (Speech & Hearing)
Thingom Medamni Devi, Internship (B.Sc. Speech & Hearing)
Kiran Roy, Internship (B.Sc. Speech & Hearing)

Abstract

As there are only a handful of studies analyzing the effects of the stress pattern of native language on non-native language, the present study aimed to investigate the effects of the stress pattern of native Manipuri (Tone language) speakers and native Hindi (non-tone language) speakers.

20 native Manipuri speakers who could speak Hindi (10 males and 10 females) and twenty native Hindi speakers (10 males and 10 females) in the age range of 20 – 23 years were made to say 10 Manipuri and 10 Hindi sentences (having adjective and noun combination) in two conditions; first with no stress and secondly, stressing the adjective. Manipuri speakers were asked to say the sentences which were in Manipuri and Hindi and the native Hindi speakers were asked to say the sentences only in Hindi. Recorded sentences were subjected to acoustical analysis. Tone Duration, Tone Height and Peak Amplitude were measured and S-ratios for these parameters were calculated.

The results indicated that tone language speakers', produce stress by increasing the duration of the word or syllable and this pattern of stress in their native language influences the pattern of stress in their second language also. This suggests that, the stress patterns of native language have a major effect on the stress pattern of the other languages they speak. The obtained data will foster our understanding of the behavior of stress in bilingual speakers of native tone language and non tone language.

Introduction

A tone language is one having a lexically significant, contrastive but relative pitch on each syllable (Beach, 1924). Tone language has four basic characteristics; lexically significant pitch (pitch distinguishes the meanings of words), Contrastive pitch (pitch that can be differing within a functional system), relative pitch (relative height of the toneme), significant pitch unit (most frequently there is one to one correlation between the number of syllables and the number of tonemes specific utterance, however a syllable may have more than one toneme).

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Thingom Medamni Devi, Internship (B.Sc. Speech & Hearing)
Kiran Roy, Internship (B.Sc. Speech & Hearing)
Narasimhan. S.V., M.Sc. (Speech & Hearing).

Corresponding Author:
Thingom Medamni Devi
Internship (B.Sc. Speech & Hearing)
J.S.S. Institute of Speech and Hearing
Ooty Road, Mysore 570025
Karnataka
India
thmedha08@gmail.com
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