English stress is realized by means of vowel reduction at the segmental level and duration, pitch, and intensity at the suprasegmental level. Using these acoustic correlates of English stress, we test the hypothesis that production errors are closely related to misperception. Korean learners of English have been known to be sensitive to pitch but not to duration in the perception of English stress. We carried out a production experiment of English stress and compared the results with those in the perception studies. Neither the whole data nor the individual data show that the acoustic cues in perception is correlated to those in production. We conclude that production in L2 can be independent of perception at the low phonetic level, since the acoustic cues are non-linguistic as well as linguistic.
