First language influences on the production of morphologically complex lexical stress

Abstract

Although prior research suggests that suprasegmental phonological awareness contributes to English learners’ acquisition of lexical stress, less attention has been paid to morphological awareness and how learners’ first language (L1) shapes this ability, particularly since morpho-phonological cues change how stress is produced in multimorphemic words. Here, we compared L1-English speakers’ performance in reading aloud multimorphemic words and pseudowords with English learners from two typologically distinct L1s: Mandarin (morphologically sparse) and Russian (morphologically rich). Results indicate that a morphologically rich L1 facilitates the development of stronger morphological awareness, enabling L1-Russian learners to transfer this knowledge to their English acquisition. This resulted in better performance in reading-aloud tasks than L1-Mandarin learners, and even slightly better than native L1-English speakers in producing morphologically complex pseudowords. Both theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed.