Acquisition of stress assignment phonology by Levantine Arabic Learners of English: Evidence from nonsense words

This study examines how Levantine Arabic learners acquire English lexical stress—a suprasegmental feature closely tied to intelligibility, comprehensibility, and perceived accentedness. Employing an innovative methodology based on the production of nonsense words, the research compares stress assignment patterns across learners of varying proficiency levels and native speakers of English. Data were elicited through 28 nonsense items representing diverse phonological structures and produced by 40 participants, yielding 1120 analyzed tokens. The results indicate persistent L1 influence and limited internalization of English stress principles, even among advanced learners. The findings suggest that learners rely heavily on memorization rather than acquiring a generalized rule system. These outcomes point to the important role of explicit instruction in teaching pronunciation and increasing learner awareness. The findings are discussed within influential models of L2 phonological acquisition, including the Speech Learning Model and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, which together explain the persistent challenges in restructuring the L1 metrical system. Pedagogical implications for second language acquisition (SLA) are also addressed.