The Acquisition Of English Word-Final Stops By Chinese EFL Learners

The research in L2 phonology is of particular importance given the fundamental differences between phonological and other linguistic skills and the prominence and tenaciousness of "foreign accent" observed in second language learners' pronunciation. Within the field of L2 phonology, the most frequently studied area is syllable structure. Accordingly, the present study also focuses on L2 syllable structures.After a brief review of major theories or hypotheses applied in L2 phonology, the Optimality Theory (OT) turns out to be the most powerful and also the most influential phonological theory so far. The major advantage of OT lies in its explanatory power which incorporates universality and cross-linguistic variation. The central assumption of OT is that every language consists of a set of constraints. The constraints are universal but the ranking of the constraints is language specific. In this way, OT is capable of explaining L2 phonological phenomena with a combined perspective of native language transfer and universal principles. Therefore, the present study chooses OT as the theoretical framework.Up to now, OT has been widely adopted in the studies of L2 phonology abroad (e.g., Broselow, Chen & Wang,1998; Radwanska-Williams &Yam,2001; Broselow & Xu,2004; Cardoso,2007). In China, however, OT has not been widely adopted with only a few researchers beginning to interpret their L2 phonological data under the framework of OT (e.g., Yan,2004; Z. Xiao,2004; Fan,2008). Therefore, the present study intends to fill this gap by investigating Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of English word-final stops under the framework of OT. And the four research questions are listed as follows.(1) Will Chinese EFL learners have problems in pronouncing singleton word-final stops?(2) Will there be variations in Chinese EFL learners'pronunciation of voiced and voiceless stops?(3) What are the major simplification strategies used by Chinese EFL learners when pronouncing singleton word-final stops?(4) Will the formality of task types used in the data collection procedure affect the accuracy of Chinese EFL learners'pronunciation in singleton word-final stops?The research design is then presented as follows. The subjects are ten Chinese EFL learners who are English major freshmen and two native English speakers who are selected as a control to provide baseline data for the accuracy judgement of the subjects'performance. The target sound segments are English singleton coda stops. Besides the questionnaires used to examine subjects'backgrounds, the major materials in this study are two tasks. Task 1 is word list reading with 30 words containing the target segments for subjects to read aloud and Task 2 is picture description containing 30 pictures with each picture eliciting one target word. The instruments employed are a laptop equipped with the Praat software for data collection, and another two software packages--OTSoft 2.3 and SPSS 11.5 for data analysis. The research procedures contain first of all a pilot study, and then the research project, which is conducted with data collection, transcription and analysis.There are four major findings in this research.First, Chinese EFL learners do have problems pronouncing singleton coda stops, the reason of which is attributed to the higher position of NO OBS CODA in the ranking system of their interlanguage grammar.Second, Chinese EFL learners have slightly more problems with voiced stops than voiceless stops. The OT interpretation is that the current constraint ranking of the subjects'interlanguage grammar generally resembles that of their native language, Mandarin Chinese, in which the markedness constraint NO VOICED OBS CODA is presently masked by the higher-ranked constraint NO OBS CODA.Third, the major simplification strategies used by Chinese EFL learners are epenthesis, deletion and devoicing and the choice of different simplification strategies is caused by different ranking orders between markedness and faithfulness constraints in subjects'interlanguage grammar. Last but not least, there exists positive relationship between task formality and subjects'pronunciation accuracy. In this study, Task 1 is more formal than Task 2 and subjects'pronunciation of the target segments is more accurate in Task 1 than in Task 2.The reason is that Task 1 focuses subjects'major attention on the articulatory control of the target words whereas Task 2 requires subjects to interpret the pictures, which occupies subjects'primary attention in semantic and syntactic interpretation and thus leaves less attention to be paid to pronunciation accuracy.The major theoretical implication of this study is that OT proves to be a powerful and promising framework in the explanation of L2 phonological universality and variation. In terms of pedagogical implications, EFL teachers in China are suggested to pay more attention to learners'acquisition of singleton coda consonants and the acquisition of voiceless consonants should also be emphasized. In addition, EFL teachers in China should be familiar with the major simplification strategies used by learners so that they could effectively instruct them to gradually get rid of these strategies. Finally, the teaching approach of focus-on-form is suggested to Chinese EFL teachers in pronunciation instruction.