A Contrastive Study of Stress in German and Persian prefixed words and the complexities of word stress in German prefixed words for Persian language learners

The present study aims to investigate the difficulties of word stress in German prefixed words for Persian students of German language major at Isfahan University from the perspective of contrastive linguistics and error analysis. German and Persian are syllabic languages in which one or more than one syllable of a word is pronounced with more emphasis. The prefixed Persian words are mostly pronounced without stress; however, Some German prefixed words are enunciated with stress, and in some cases, the word stress has a distinguishing characteristic in which the change in the stress leads to a variation in the meaning of the word or sentence. The lack of commonality in phonetic rules between the two languages results in errors in some language learners leading to disruption in communicating with the audience in real situations. In order to analyze the controlling factors two groups of students received assignments to pronounce words and sentences containing various prefixes in German. The obtained results indicated that in the junior students who did not master in the related phonetic rules, the most important cause of error was linguistic interference from the mother tongue and the tendency to stress the final syllables of the prefixed words. The number of errors in the senior and graduated students is much less than that of the first group due to their familiarity with the phonetic rules, Moreover, in this group of students, the major reasons included language interference, overgeneralization, the lack of fixation of rules, fossilization, and wrong mental hypothesizing.