The influence of syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of known
words on the acquisition of the English stress system was investigated in ten native Thai
speakers. All participants were adult learners of English with an average length of residence
in the US of 1.4 years. They were asked to produce and give perceptual judgments on 40
English non-words of varying syllabic structures in noun and verb sentence frames. Results
of the production data suggested that syllables with a long vowel attracted stress more often
than syllables containing a short vowel and nouns received initial stress more often than
verbs. Additionally, regression analyses with the three factors as predictors suggested that
Thai participants’ pattern of stress assignment on non-words was significantly influenced
by the stress patterns of phonologically similar real words. These results were compared
and contrasted to those found in previous work with Spanish–English and Korean–English
bilinguals.