The Influence of Written Stress Marks on Native English Speakers’ Acquisition of Russian Lexical Stress Contrasts

Recent studies have provided evidence for a beneficial effect of orthographic input on the acquisition of second language phonological contrasts. In particular, the presentation of orthographic contrasts has been shown to improve L2 learners’ ability to differentiate newly learned words containing difficult auditory contrasts—for example, the letters ‘a’ and ‘e’ can help native Dutch speakers differentiate newly learned English words containing /æ/ and /ɛ/ (Escudero, Hayes-Harb and Mitterer). In the present research, we explored whether the diacritic marks typically used to indicate lexical stress in Russian pedagogical texts are similarly helpful to second language learners. We taught native English speakers with varying amounts of Russian language experience a set of Russian non-words containing lexical stress minimal pairs. In different word-learning conditions, we manipulated the presence of stress marks in the input to participants, and later tested participants on their ability to distinguish the newly learned lexical stress minimal pairs. We found no effect from the availability of stress marks for our participants, whose Russian language experience ranged from subjects with no exposure to Russian to students enrolled in third-year college-level Russian language courses. We conclude by discussing crucial differences between the learning conditions in the present study and real-world Russian language acquisition, and calling for future research that investigates the effect of lexical stress marks in more authentic learning conditions.