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cjls

Articles

CJLS: VOL. 10, NO. 2, DECEMBER 2022

WORD STRESS PATTERNS OF YORUBA-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN

Submitted
December 5, 2023
Published
2023-12-13

Abstract

Stress is one of the prosodic features of English, in addition to intonation and rhythm. Many English learners have great difficulty with these prosodic features. The need to urgently address this challenge motivated this study and many others. This study examined the stress patterns of Yoruba-English bilingual children in English disyllabic words. One hundred Nigerian children from two south-western states in Nigeria served as the study participants. The data for the study comprise six disyllabic nouns (mother, baby, daughter, textbooks, person and village), three disyllabic verbs (believed, become, provide), and one disyllabic adverb (enough). The findings reveal that both word initial and word final stress patterns were used in pronouncing English disyllabic words by Yoruba-English bilingual children in Ogun and Oyo states. Village, mother, baby, daughter and person were stressed on the initial syllable, while enough, provide, textbooks, believed and become were stressed on the final syllable. Except for textbooks,the stress patterns of the participants were similar to the Standard British English (SBE) patterns presented in the 18th edition of Daniel Jones’ Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. However, some of the Yoruba-English bilingual children from the public schools experienced difficulty in pronouncing some of the tested disyllabic words.

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