A longitudinal study of the acquisition of English stress

Abstract

The study that I discuss today differs in two respects from my previous studies. One, it is a longitudinal study, and two, it involves different first languages. Ideally, it might have been better to change only one of the factors, but these are the subjects who were available to me for a longitudinal study. As a result, this paper has more to say about the influence of the first language type on second language acquisition than on patterns of development over time, because, as we shall see, the performance didn't change very much over time.