Acquisition Of English Contrastive Stress Patterns In Chinese Advanced And Beginning Learners Of English

This thesis explores the Chinese EFL learners' production of the two types of stress patterns(noun phrase and compound).English is an accentual language,which realizes its stress by a combination of acoustic correlates: pitch(F0),duration,intensity and so on.However,Chinese is a tone language,which relies on the fundamental frequency to distinguish lexical tones.The experiments examined the acoustic features that native English speakers and different levels of non-native speakers(Chinese beginning learners and advanced learners of English)use to distinguish these two contrastive stress.According to the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis,second language learners would be influenced by their native language.If two languages are similar to each other,it will be easier for the learners to acquire the second language.If two languages are different,it will lead to difficulty for the learners to acquire the second language successfully.The influence of mother tongue is very strong,but to what extent that it would affect the production of the compound and phrasal stress is uncertain.Three research questions below are addressed in this thesis:1)How do nonnative English learners in Chinese differ from native English speakers in the production of compound stress and phrasal stress in terms of F0,intensity,and duration?2)How do advanced English learners in Chinese differ from the beginning English learners in the production of compound stress and phrasal stress in terms of F0,intensity,and duration?3)Whether the advanced and beginning English learners can produce the right stress pattern for compound nouns and noun phrases or not?The current study utilized the wordlist of T.Anh-Thu' Nguye,C.L.John Ingram,J.Rob Pensalfini(2008),published in the Journal of Phonetics.Experiments were conducted with three groups of subjects: native speakers,beginning learners and advanced learners,each group is of 10 participants.The stimuli were 12 groups of sentences,each is divided into 2 sentences,altogether is 24 sentences.The major findings in this study are:1)The native and non-native speakers have different performance in the experiment because of the phonological background of their first language.Native English speakers manipulate a combination of F0,intensity and duration todistinguish the two stress patterns.While the Chinese learners of English based on a combination of F0,intensity,and duration,but they have their own characteristics.2)Chinese advanced group perform better than the beginning group.Apart from F0 alignment,the advanced learners act successfully almost in all the other parameters that we design,which shows the influence of language experience on prosodic acquisition,guided by OPM.Chinese beginning learners can quite successfully employ most of the F0,intensity and duration parameters on syllables which carry accent in different levels.However,they are found to be unable to use the parameters concerning less prominent syllables as native-like,such as F0 range,intensity range,duration range.This manifests that they fail to deaccent the second element of the compounds and the first element of phrases.The beginning learners cannot produce F0 alignment well in compounds,duration pause between words both in compounds and phrases.3)Both advanced and beginning group cannot differentiate compound words and phrases in terms of F0 mean difference,intensity mean difference,and duration difference.The results in this study suggest that Chinese EFL learners especially the beginning learners tend to apply their native phonological strategies and are more sensitive to acoustic cues that are activated in their native language in production English compound and phrasal stresses,which can be explained by the positive transfer under Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis.The distinctive performance of advanced and beginning learners reveals that different developmental phrases that the L2 learners would experience,which lends support to OPM.