| This thesis makes a study on the intonation of the declarative question "You mean you are not confident that you can pass them?" by comparing the intonation of the sentence read by the Chinese EFL learners with those read by the native English speakers.The 30 sentences are edited and transferred into proper form using the software of digital sound editor "cool edit" and sound file format converter "switch". 26 sentences are chosen for further comparison because they have the same results of nucleus marking through auditory approach and instrumental approach.Only 12 sentences are selected as the core of analysis after the comparison of nuclei and nuclear tones of the target sentences between the Chinese EFL learners and the native speakers in this study.Then the relative pitch height of each sentence is defined according to the habitual based line each speaker prefers in their dialogue reading. After that,the waveform and pitch contour of each sentence are obtained before pitch analysis is conducted by means of the phonetic software "praat".On the basis of the pitch contour and pitch analysis,each sentence is pitch labeled.Finally,a diagram of the unitary combination of the waveform,pitch contour,pitch labeling and orthographic form of each sentence is drawn.In accordance with these diagrams,the sentences are analyzed from three levels,the pitch movement,the unitary sequences of pitch movements into "configurations" of prenclear patterns and nuclear tones,and the combination of pitch-movement configurations into contour of the whole sentence all in an attempt to sum up the characteristics of the intonation of the target sentence read by the Chinese EFL learners,to provide an example of tone tier labeling of ToBI for the annotation of English spoken by Chinese EFL learners,to pose some thought-provoking problems relevant to this topic and to arouse interests in this field.By comparison of the intonation contours of the target sentence read by the Chinese EFL learners with those read by the native speakers,we observe that 1) some Chinese EFL learners in our study cannot identify properly the intonational features of the comment clause in the target sentence,which possibly implies that the three groups of Chinese EFL learners are at different developmental stages of the acquisition of English;2) some Chinese EFL learners in our study have gentle pitch movements on the unstressed syllables read in their strong forms probably due to the first impression in their English learning;3) the pitch movements in prenuclear patterns are irregular and complex,and are not usually combined into conventional or meaningful prenuclear patterns to correspond with the nuclear tones possibly due to their limited exposure to intonation knowledge,their difficulty in the acquisition of the language aspects associated with the right hemisphere,such as prosody and intonation,and the negative transfer from Chinese tones;4) the Chinese EFL learners in this study can identify correctly the syntactic structure of the target sentence and distinguish stressed words from unstressed ones,but they cannot realize properly the pitch contours to reflect the accentual and syntactic information,possibly because they process all linguistic data using analytic strategies associated with the left hemisphere instead of the right hemisphere whose participation is most essential for initial orientation when there is no relevant descriptive system immediately available in the cognitive repertoire.These reveal that transfer alone cannot explain the Chinese EFL learners' intonation contour of the target sentence;teaching and neurocognitive factors also need to be taken into account. |
