Transfer Of Uygur Declarative And Interrogative Intonations In English Learning

The purpose of the present study was to investigate in detail the similarities and differences of English declarative and interrogative intonations produced by Uygur university students and English native speakers. The experiments include two parts: Declarative and Interrogative Intonations of Uygur; Declarative and Interrogative Intonations of English Produced by Uygur students. Two groups of speakers with one group of 30 Uygur students and one group of 5 English native speakers participated in the experiments. The study focused on two questions: 1) How well can Uygur students produce English declarative and interrogative intonations compared with their English native speaker counterparts? 2) Are English declarative and interrogative intonations produced by Uygur students affected by their first language?Data collection in the experiment was conducted by using the speech signal processing package Praat and data analysis was performed by using the statistic program SPSS. The results showed that the Uygur declarative sentences were always with the fall intonation, F0 contours of the sentence-final syllables of Uygur yes-no question without particle, yes-no question with particle, and wh-question were all rise, therefore, Uygur interrogative sentences were more likely to end with terminal rise. In Uygur, the five types of sentences didn't have differences in the initial part, they were discriminated especially in the last part of the sentences.Furthermore, Comparisons of the five kinds of English sentences between the two groups of people showed that the general trend of F0 curves of the English sentences produced by the Uygur students and English native speakers approximately remained the same in declarative sentences, yes-no question, tag-question and a-not-a question sentences. With the exception for the English wh-question, Uygur students produced it with a terminal rise, while the English native speakers produced it with a terminal fall. It had to be mentioned that Uygur students produced the Wh-question with a terminal rise in their native language, meanwhile, with a terminal rise in English. This may explain how the first language intonation of Uygur students affected their production of English intonation.The study on Uygur students' production of English intonation is helpful for the L2 learners to overcome the negative transfer of the intonation patterns of their mother tongue into the L2 learning. It also provides some scientific evidence for the L2 intonation acquisition of L1 speakers in the view of productive aspect.