An Experimental Phonetic Research On Prosodic Features Of Interlanguage Based On A Parallel Corpus

With the in-depth development of second language speech acquisition study, the importance of prosody for English teaching and learning is now widely recognized in the field of phonetics and phonology. Though more and more scholars make efforts in studying the prosodic features of L2, it is still one of the most difficult phonetic features to quantity or describe because of its indefiniteness and complexity. With the development of computer technology and experimental phonetics, advanced experimental instruments and devices are put into use, which provide a large amount of scientific and visualized data for phonetic studies and make it possible to apply quantitative methods in phonetic researches. Acoustic measurements offer effective solutions to the problems that cannot be worked out by traditional sound-listening and sound-recording approach. It remedies the deficiencies of traditional phonetics(also known as “Kou Er Zhi Xue” in China) and gradually becomes the most popular research method in phonetic and phonological studies.As members from different language families, English distinguishes itself from Chinese by different phonological system and pronunciation rules. More importantly, Chinese varies from dialects to dialects with their sound systems differing to a great extent. Under the influence of mother tongue, EFL learners in dialectal regions have been found to transfer the phonological features of the native language to the target language unconsciously in the process of English acquisition. As a result, their speech production is apparently characterized by certain dialectal accent and even typical pronunciation errors. These pronunciation errors mostly come to appear at an early stage of English acquisition, which are gradually formed and eventually become part of the so-called “interlanguage”. It is broadly claimed that the key of solving foreign-accents problems in speaking English is to learn and master the prosodic features of English. Yet the situation may simply become worse with the difficulty in extracting prosodic features from the speech behavior and insufficient instruction from language courses at school. Recently, with the help of experimental phonetics, the deviances in English prosody are exposed and visualized in the studies on the prosodic features of Chinese learners. However, influences of dialects are inadequately considered in the previous studies. The description, classification and generalization of the prosodic features and error patterns of EFL learners from dialectal regions help to put forward the corresponding countermeasures of correction and improvement to develop the phonetic awareness of EFL learners.Accordingly, a phonetic experiment is conducted based on a Parallel Corpus between Ningbo EFL learners and American native speakers. The reading materials include 14 English yes-no questions extracted from AESOP-CASS corpus. The data are collected from 30 Ningbo EFL learners(15 males and 15 females). The phonetic experiment in the present study follows 4 major steps: firstly, the recordings are labeled with syllabic and phonemic boundaries by automatic segmentation software; then the suprasegmental features of the utterance are annotated with a modified system based on IViE and ToBI; by running specially designed Praat script, F0 of each vowel contained within the utterance are extracted at ten equal proportional intervals to normalize duration of time and the prosodic features are obtained as well; at last the data are further organized with Excel and SPSS and the results are visually presented in the form of figures and tables.Based on observation and analysis of acoustic parameters extracting from Praat-assisted annotation, some findings concerned with this study are observed: i) In respect of accent distribution, prominences are placed on more syllables in the sentences spoken by Ningbo learners than those by native speakers; emphasis even goes to unstressed syllable. What is more, Ningbo learners’ phonetic realization of pitch accents is distinguished from that of American speakers to a large extent: American speakers apply L*H tone at the focal position, while Ningbo EFL learners adopt two different pitch patterns —— either H* or H*L. ii) Regarding phrasing patterns, EFL learners tend to use frequent breaks and pauses in the middle of intermediate phrases which cut the phrase into meaningless word groups which disagree with syntactic or semantic units. iii) In view of intonation pattern, the results show that Ningbo learners use falling intonations at the boundary of yes-no questions; and the rising intonations have pitch movements different from native speakers. More importantly, Ningbo learners fail to reflect meaning difference with the change of intonation.