An Acoustic Study On English Intonation Patterns Of Chinese EFL Learners From Shandong Dialectal Region:Taking Declarative Sentences,Yes-no Questions And Alternative Questkms As Examples

On the basis of Intonation Pattern theory and Contrastive Analysis theory,this study is devoted to describing the intonation patterns of declarative sentences,yes-no questions and alternative questions between standard American speakers and Chinese EFL learners from Shandong dialectal region including English majors and non-English majors respectively and the contrastive study is also made between them in hope of providing some suggestions for English phonetic teaching.The subjects are chosen from Asian English Speech cOrpus Project(AESOP)randomly by means of stratified sampling.The corpora of eight American native speakers(four males and four females)are provided by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences(CASS)whose oral English is VOA standard.Eight senior English majors and eight non-English majors are chosen form AESOP-CASS-SD with four males and four females in each group.The selected speech materials are composed of five declarative sentences,six yes-no questions and four alternative questions on the basis of research purposes.The procedures of data processing are as follows: First of all,the reading materials are annotated with the aid of speech analysis software PRAAT;Secondly,the pitch values are extracted;And finally,the data are processed with the help of Excel and corresponding intonation patterns are drawn with the aid of Mspaint.The experimental data will be analyzed in terms of full range,foot range and fluctuation.The results are as follows: 1)In declarative sentences,the following conclusions are drawn: Firstly,the full range of females is wider than that of males and the full range of standard American speakers is wider than that of English majors and non-English majors;Secondly,there is little difference in each foot range for standard American speakers but there is a discrepancy as for English majors and non-English majors.Thirdly,there is an obvious downward tendency in foot fluctuation;2)In yes-no questions,the following conclusions are drawn: Firstly,the full range of standard American speakers and SD EFL learners has increased significantly in comparison with declarative sentences;Secondly,the third foot range is the widest,followed by the second foot range and the first foot range is the narrowest for standard American speakers,but it doesn’t have a unified rule for English majors andnon-English majors;Thirdly,there is an obvious upward tendency for standard American speakers,but foot fluctuation of English majors first decreases and then increases and there is a downward tendency for non-English majors;3)In alternative sentences,the conclusions are as follows: Firstly,the full range of SD EFL learners is narrower than that of native speaker;Secondly,the second foot range of standard American speakers is the widest while there is a great discrepancy in foot range for English majors and the first foot has a relative wide range for most of non-English majors selected;Thirdly,there is an obvious upward tendency in the second foot and a downward tendency in the third foot for standard American speakers while there is a downward tendency for non-English majors and even English majors are not good at the utterance of alternative questions.The present study has both theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,it expands the research scope of Intonation Pattern Theory by means of experimental phonetic methods and provides new perspective for further studies on English intonation.In practical terms,this study improves English teachers’ concentration on English intonation teaching and further guide students’ English intonation studies.