A Study On The Prosodic Features Of Yes-No Questions By Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners

This paper attempts to explore the prosodic features of yes-no questions read byChinese Northeastern EFL learners based on acoustic experiments. The prosodicfeatures are specifically the phrase segmentation, the accenting distribution and theintonation patterns. The speech data of this experiment are a part of AESOP-CASS(Asian English Speech Corpus Project-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) corpus.The speech data of16EFL learners from Ha’erbin, Changchun, Shenyangand Dalian(4each city, half males and half females) are selected and annotated. The prosodicfeatures obtained from the Chinese learners are compared with those of4Americannative speakers (2males and2females). The purpose is to locate the acquisitiondeviations of Chinese Northeastern EFL learners from native speakers and provideempirical implications for the EFL teaching and learning.The annotation of the speech data is via Praat under a refined labelling systemcombining ToBI and IViE to meet the requirements of the research purpose. Theannotated data are processed to illustrate the phrase segmentation and accentingpatterns of American native speakers and Chinese learners. The pitch in Hz is thentransferred into semitone to get the pitch patterns of the two groups of subjects.Results show that (1) Most Chinese learners adopt a high tone or a falling tone toexpress the non-final focused word, while American native speakers employ alow-rising tone.(2) Chinese learners tend to use a low-rising tone or a falling tone torealize the focused word at the sentence-final, while all American speakers use alow-rising tone.(3) Some Chinese learners are likely to accent the interrogative word“can”“does/do/did” and the prepositions in the yes-no questions, which rarely occursfor American native speakers. In addition, more words are accented by Chineselearners than their American counterparts.(4) Chinese learners tend to accent the lastsyllable of the yes-no questions.(5) Chinese English learners use more intonationphrases and intermediate phrases in their speeches, which results in many unnecessarypauses thus making their speeches choppy and faltering.(6) As to the pitch contoursof the same sentence with different focus positions (e.g. Can JANE come with Tom? and Can Jane come with TOM? with the capitalized words denoting the focus), thefindings are as follows: Native speakers’ pitch curve of the front focused word JANEalmost overlaps with that of the unfocused JANE, but their pitch contour of the finalfocused word TOM is lower than that of the unfocused final word TOM, whichindicates that native speakers can distinguish the focused word via intonation. ForChinese learners，despite the different positions of focus, some learners show noobvious differences on both the front focus and final focus; the rest show manyvariations: they express front focus with such means as PFC (post focus compression),expansion of F0, a combination of PFC and L*H, or PFC plus a falling tone plusexpansion of F0and so on; and they express final focus with such means as a hightone, a falling tone, a L*H tone, pitch rising, or L*H plus pitch rising and so on. Andthese means are clear evidence of the interference of the first language. So ChineseEnglish teachers and students should raise their awareness of the different prosodicfeatures between L1and L2and try to lessen the interference of L1to improve thestudents’ oral English performance.