The relationship between the production of word stress and musical abilities in Polish learners of English

Abstract

The pilot study presented in this paper is exploratory in nature and aims first to investigate if there exists a relationship between the production of word stress and learners' musical abilities, and then, to explore the effects of this relationship on teachability of word stress to Polish advanced students of English. The results of the analysis on the auditory recordings were compared with the information provided by the informants in a questionnaire and a performance music test. The obtained data were analysed using descriptive statistics. The results show that the students tend to overgeneralise word stress rules in English rather than transfer the penultimate syllable rule from Polish. In addition, there seems to be a relationship between word stress production and musical ability for the majority of the participants.