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Learning a new language brings up different challenges to non-native speakers and one of the most important challenges is pronunciation. We have often witnessed learners complaining about how difficult it is to sound like a native speaker. Even those who have a relatively advanced level of proficiency are not quite confident about their pronunciation in the second/foreign language. Lexical stress has been reported to pose difficulties to second/foreign-language (L2) learners that can make their pronunciation less comprehensible. When word stress in properly used in the speech, the pronunciation will instantly and automatically be improved.
What is Word Stress?
In many languages like English, each syllable of a word is not pronounced with the same force or strength. In some words, we accentuate one specific syllable which means we say that syllable stronger and other syllables relatively less prominently.
Let's consider three words: photograph, photographer and photographic. They are not pronounced the same way as we accentuate or stress one of the syllables stronger than the others in each word. And it is not always the same syllable. To help visualised the stressed syllable, the prominent ones are highlighted: photograph, photographer and photographic.
Putting a stress on one syllable of the word happens in all words with two or more syllables in many languages.
Does French also have Stress?
Stress in French is a bit different from English and it’s called “Phrasal Stress”. The basic underlying stress pattern is based on the entire phrases, and it is the final syllable in each phrase that takes the stress. It’s important to note that the terme "phrase" in this context does not necessarily mean a "sentence". A phrase in French is actually a group of words that are in a syntactic relationship with one another. For example, Bébé as a single word gets one final stress. If this noun is preceded by a determinant, the whole group still gets one stress on the last syllable of the group (Ces bébés). None the less, adding an adjective or adjectives to this group would replace the stress and the final syllable of the last word will receive the stress (Ces petits bébés adorables). The location of stress in French is fixed at the word level, but its realization depends upon the position of a word within a phrase. That is, the final full syllable of a word is realized with longer duration and higher intensity than non-final syllables only if it is the last full syllable of a phrase.
A widely observed phenomenon on L2 learners’ production of word stress is the interaction of the individual’s first language (mother tongue) with the language they are learning, also called cross-linguistic influence causing variability in learners’ ability to develop native-like production of stress.
Many studies have observed the impact of the native-language (L1) stress patterns on the generalizations that L2 learners make with respect to stress placement in the target language. These studies on the L2 production of lexical and phrasal stress revealed that learners carry over L1 stress patterns into their L2 speech, both in terms of the location and the phonetic properties used to realized prominence including with intonation.
Previous research on L2 French has demonstrated that learners of various L1 backgrounds (Czech, English, German, Peninsular and Mexican Spanish, and Polish) experience difficulties with French phrasal stress in terms of producing units of appropriate size, producing the prominent syllable on the final full syllable, and realizing such final rises in a target-like manner including by producing exaggerated final rises.
The important issue of the challenges caused by the cross-linguistics influence that was briefly addressed above, has attracted the attention of many research and the general findings offer convincing support for the efficacy of the corrective feedback to overcome the cross-linguistics influence. In simple terms, corrective feedback has been defined as “responses to learner utterances containing an error” from a reliable source such as a language instructor.
There is variety of means by which teachers can help with learners’ errors during class time, so next time your teacher asks you to repeat or reformulate your sentences, rest assured that your pronunciation will significantly improve over time.