Article

The Role of Lexical Stress in English as a Lingua Franca in Southeast Asia

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Abstract

The role of lexical stress for intelligibility in English as a lingua franca settings (ELF) has been debated. Some scholars argue that lexical stress is unnecessary for international intelligibility, yet others contend that it remains important. Moreover, the discussion of unexpected lexical stress is usually limited to directional shifts, but it should also include other types of innovations. To further investigate the role of lexical stress in ELF interactions, a corpus was collected involving 41 speakers from nine countries in Southeast Asia as they described two sets of discuss-the-difference tasks specifically designed to encourage the production of polysyllabic words. The findings demonstrate that even though innovative word stress was generally intelligible in these interactions, unexpected word stress was still implicated in 24 tokens of misunderstanding. These misunderstandings reveal that deletions of a syllable and shifts in stress with concomitant changes in vowel quality affect intelligibility the most in this ELF context. Intelligible innovations in this corpus demonstrate that equal stress and shifts in lexical stress which do not involve vowel changes rarely hamper intelligibility. Therefore, pronouncing expected syllable patterns and retaining vowel quality while stressing words in ELF interactions in Southeast Asia may enhance intelligibility.

How to Cite: Lewis, C. (2022). The role of lexical stress in English as a lingua franca in Southeast Asia. In J. Levis & A. Guskaroska (eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, held June 2021 virtually at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.13338