| Based on the database of AESOP-CASS-SD(Asian English Speech cOrpus ProjectChinese Academy of Social Sciences-Shandong), this paper analyzes the acquisition of English vowels produced by Shandong learners from the perspective of acoustics. The study selects four front vowels /i/, /?/, /?/, /?/ as the target vowels and extracts the English data and dialect data of Shandong students and the data of American students, aiming to investigate the error patterns of vowel segments and the influence of transfer from Shandong dialect on the acquisition of the four front vowels.So far, there are just more than a dozen papers about the influence of Shandong dialect on the acquisition of English pronunciation. In terms of the research methods, these papers mainly adopted qualitative research, mostly based on questionnaires and interviews. The related quantitative research is relatively rare. And most of them describe pronunciation errors of English learners from the perspective of auditory perception. There are few researches that analyze the segments acquisition of Shandong learners with experimental phonetic means.Therefore, in this regard, the research adopts the method combining quantitative with qualitative analysis and employs the experimental phonetic means to explore the problems in vowel acquisition, in order to improve the English phonetic levels of Shandong students and provide the reference for the level of English phonetic teaching.The recording data needed in the study are from AESOP-CASS-SD, including the data of sixty-four students from sixteen cities and four American students, each city with two males and two females. According to the division of Shandong dialect from Qian(2001), the study selects the students of Weifang, Qingdao, Rizhao and Mengyin from the east district of Wei, Yantai, Weihai, Rushan and Zhaoyuan from the east district of Lai, Jinan, Liaocheng,Zibo and Tai’an from the west district of Qi, Jining, Heze, Linyi and Zaozhuang from the west district of Lu as the subjects to explore three questions: i) what are the differences between speakers of EW, EL, WL, WQ in SD and AM on the acquisition of the four front vowels /i/,/?/, /?/ and /?/? ii) what are the similarities and differences on the acquisition of the target vowels by speakers of four regions in comparison with the acoustic features between AE and the English acquired by SD learners? iii) what is the kind of transfer effect from SD dialect onthe acquisition of English vowels by comparing the vowel inventories between SD dialect and AE?In the study, the parameters of formant and duration are employed to analyze the features of English vowels. The study shows that 1) Shandong students can acquire /i/ and /?/better than /?/ and /?/. There exist some problems in acquiring /?/ and /?/. 2) The articulation of/i/ and /?/ produced by SD speakers is similar. They distinguish /i/ from /?/ by duration. But there exists difference on the acquisition of /?/ and /?/. For EW and WL speakers, the tongue position tends to be backward and downward, while for WL and WQ speakers, the tongue position tends to be forward and downward. 3) As for /i/ and /?/, the positive transfer from Shandong dialect comes into play. As for /?/ and /?/, the influence of ransfer from Shandong dialect is negative. The author hopes the tentative research especially its results will give inspiration as well as necessary reference for the English learners and English pronunciation teaching. |
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