Abstract:

Word stress influences the meaning of words. There is a special category of disyllabic words called word class pairs (Roach, 2009), also called the noun/verb stress homographs (Moon & Magne, 2015), that make verb, noun or adjective mates with either similar or diverse meaning distinguished by their different pronunciation in different word classes. The recognition of their meaning and function in context is a complex matter for the English learners and these words are typically brought to attention of the English learners in a pronunciation course. The aim of the contribution is to compare the data collected from the first-year university students of English participating in a pretest-posttest research design after completion of the English Phonetics and Phonology course. The data were gathered after presenting the words during three separate sessions in communicative tasks. In addition, the paper will provide selected methods suitable for stress placement presentation.

Acknowledgements:
This paper was supported by the Rector’s grant scheme for research projects (Trnava University in Trnava, no. 14/TU/2018 Homonymy in English).

Keywords:

Homonymy, homographs, homophones, word stress.