A Study On The Prosodic Features Of Declarative Questions By Changchun EFL Learners

As an indispensible form of oral production,prosody plays a significant role for second language acquisition,which constitutes the essential part of foreign language learners' communication capacity.For Chinese English learners,nonstandard “foreignness” prosodic expression has long been the choke point for further native-like improvements,as results of different language systems,traditional teaching method,limited accessible learning resources,and also the specifically complicated dialect problems.However,researches at home concerning prosodic acquisition,especially under the background of Chinese dialects are quite rare.Based on the “Three Ts” as well as “Autosegmental-Metrical” Theories and experimental phonetics,the present study selected six declarative questions from the AESOP-CASS as reading materials;six Changchun EFL learners and six American standard speakers,half male and half female as participants.Each of these stimuli was read under both broad and narrow focus,the latter was further distinguished as sentence initial,sentence medial and sentence final.Then,came the corpus annotation and data extraction works according to the related visualized acoustic parameters,such as pitch contour,duration,intensity and so on,by employing the annotating software Praat and the combined annotation system of ToBI and IViE.After that,Excel and SPSS were applied for data statistics and analysis to explore the prosodic features of Changchun EFL learners and their deviations with American standard native speakers in the perspective of intonation phrasing,stress distribution and tone pattern respectively.The results of acoustic experiment indicated that,as for intonation segmentation,(1)Compared with American native speakers,CC EFL learners are,whether generally or individually speaking,inclined to chunk more intonation groups;(2)For the same sentence,CC EFL learners bear resemblance with native speakers in terms of phrasing approaches if and only if the sentence is characterized by quite short length,less syllables and simple syntactic structure;(3)In most cases(broad focus,initial focus and final focus),CC EFL learners would adopt more diversified phrasing patterns than native speakers,among which,only a few follow with natives;(4)When focus falls on sentence medial,native speakers,just like CC EFL learners,tend to employ diversified or even more various segmentation models,in spite of which,the total number of tone units phrased by them is still less than the latter;(5)Both CC EFL learners and native speakers exhibit significant correlation between intonation group numbers segmented and syntactic complexity degree of the reading stimulus;(6)There's significant difference between EFL learners and native speakers in terms of external acoustic markers for intonation phrasing.Pause plays an overwhelmingly dominated role for CC EFL learners,whose awareness and capacity of pitch means is still not enough;while native speakers could apply pause and pitch reset alternatively in accordance with communicating and expressing needs.Anacrusis and final syllable lengthening are seldom used by both groups;(7)Native speakers demonstrate a high coincidence between intonation segmentation and syntactic structure as well as information units;while CC EFL learners seem to be casual,producing more invalid long-timed pauses,for example,pauses between modifier and head word,or between prepositional phrase,which would affect the influence and comprehension.As for stress placement,(1)In most cases,CC EFL learners output excessive accents,and the misplacement phenomenon is severe,such as accenting function words,while under some circumstances,them go to another extreme situation and exhibit no prominence for focused constituents.As a contrast,native speakers distribute stresses based on weather a constituent is lexical or grammatical,given or new,focused or nonfocused;(2)Different from native speakers,CC EFL learners incline to accent the final word even if it is not being focused;(3)Unlike the “wave-like” fluctuated pitch contours yielded by native speakers,learners' productions are more like “straightlines” without conspicuous differentiations of up and down between the stressed and unstressed units,which sound mechanic and monotonous.In terms of intonation patterns,(1)When focus falls on non-final positions(initial or medial focus),CC EFL learners tend to employ high tone(H*)or falling tone(H*L)if the focused word is monosyllabic word and high tone or rising-falling tone(L*HL)if it is disyllabic or trisyllabic;when focus locates in sentence final,they incline to adopt low-rising tone(L*H).While native speakers adopt low-rising tone for focused word in all cases without taking into accounts of its specific position or syllable numbers contained;(2)Native speakers commonly employ rising intonation(H%)in sentence final position,while some of learners misuse the statement-like falling tone(L%),especially when the sentence involves longer length,more syllable number,and more complex syntactic structure,which is inconsistent with the interrogative nature of declarative questions;(5)As for the realization of focus,learners tend to apply PFC(post focus compression)means by expanding the pitch range of focused part and narrowing the post-focus part;on the contrary,native speakers are apt to suppress the on-focus part or keep it unchanged while expand the post-focus part.These findings provide empirical evidences and insightful implications for CC EFL learners' prosodic studies and domestic English teaching and learning.However,as for limited resources and time,there are still some shortcomings.More profound and exhausted investigations can be conducted by incorporating more reading materials,dialects as well as sentence types in the future.