| Connected speech refers to natural and continuous speech,as opposed to a single word or a phrase uttered alone.It is important for the intelligibility and smoothness of spoken English.Chinese college students are confronted with many difficulties in speaking fluent English,yet few studies have been conducted on the topic at home or abroad.Consequently,it is necessary to explore their pronunciation problems and the corresponding reasons in English connected speech based on a holistic analysis.The thesis is devoted to exploring the pronunciation problems and the causes that non-English major college students from a provincial university in China may come across in English connected speech in an empirical study.The author mainly applied quantitative research method,case study and contrastive study in the experiment.With the experiment group of the Chinese college students and the reference group of English native speakers,the author collected their reading recordings and analyzed the data with the support of Praat and SPPAS.Based on the theories of English phonetics and second language acquisition including Contrastive Analysis,Error Analysis and Interlanguage theories,the thesis analyzed the problems and reasons of the college students’ speech from four aspects,namely,assimilation,elision,linking,and rhythm.Through the experiment,the author found the absent articulation of r linking,assimilation and elision of vowels is one of the most serious pronunciation problems among Chinese participants in English connected speech.Though Chinese participants have a small problem of mixing aspirated and unaspirated with voiceless and voiced,however,the acquisition rate of elision of consonants in their English connected speech is turned out to be the highest.Other major problems include additive vowels after plosives and affricatives and higher pitch,louder intensity and longer duration spent on unstressed syllable.In addition,problems relevant to rhythm are found to be difficulties in locating sentence stress,syllable-time rhythm in Mandarin and overuses and misuses of pauses,etc.On the basis of second acquisition theory,reasons for problems were discussed.The main causes of all the above problems could be attributed to negative transfer of mother tongue,the lack of phonetic knowledge of connected English and the short of training it.The author applied theories above into the discussion of the experimental results from the above four aspects in English connected speech in order to provide implications for college students and English teachers in middle school.More problems and reasons for Chinese college students’ acquiring difficulties in English connected speech need to be further discussed from the perceptual angle or from the field of applied psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics,etc. |
