Acquisition Of Intonation By Chinese EFL Learners

The purpose of this study is to find out problems in Chinese EFL learners' intonation patterns. Specifically, there are three research questions in this study, 1) what are the Chinese learners' English intonation regularities? 2) What is the relation between learners' production and perception, especially for the tunes that can't be produced by them? 3) What are the causes of learners' problems in English intonation? Does negative transfer exist in the learners' intonation? This study adopts the AM theory to analyze the intonation patterns of American native speakers and Chinese EFL learners through acoustic analysis and perceptual experiment.In our previous study, the intonation patterns of statements and yes-no questions have been analyzed in detail. So this study investigates the intonation patterns of WH-questions at first. Then comparisons are made among intonation patterns of the three sentence types, statements, yes-no questions and WH-questions. For each sentence type, different focus locations are included. Results show that 1) the American speakers tend to adopt a H tone on nuclear accent in statements and WH-questions while a L tone in yes-no questions. But the Chinese learners always apply a H tone on nuclear accent no matter what sentence type the sentence is. 2) The American speakers don't accent the WH-word in WH-questions. But the Chinese learners accent WH-word in most cases. The same thing happens to the second word in yes-no questions. A perceptual experiment is conducted to investigate the learners' perception of prominence. The Chinese listeners can't perceive the accents in yes-no questions well as they can do in statements, which indicate that there is a close relationship between Chinese learners' production and perception of intonation. Also the effect of negative transfer is observed through comparison between the learners' intonation patterns of English and of their native language, Mandarin Chinese.