Abstract: The placement of stress in English words often confuses Chinese EFL learners. Studies in contrast between Chinese and English reveal that Chinese lexical stress patterns differ significantly from that of English. Through the analysis, we find that this difference originates from the fact that the lexical stress patterns of the two languages are influenced by different elements: English lexical stress patterns are closely related to the morphological patterns of words while Chinese lexical stress patterns are always influenced by prosodic and semantic features, which, in turn, may have caused Chinese students’ insensitivity to English lexical stress and difficulty in mastering English lexical stress rules