Study On Prosodic Perception And Production Of Chinese English Learners’ Disjunctive Question

Prosody is of great importance to spoken language,and mastering and practicing the prosodic features of second language can help improve the appearance of speech.Whether and how the perception and production of prosody are related has rarely been clearly explained in traditional phonological studies because it is difficult to quantify the perception and production of speech.Experimental phonology uses advanced equipment and analysis software to transform abstract prosodic features into intuitive data,making it possible to quantify prosody.In this study,we select the disjunctive questions that occur frequently in English everyday conversation for a phonological experiment to analyze learners’ perception and production of their prosody,aiming to reveal the relationship between perception and production of phonology to a certain extent.Based on the Autosegmental Metrical Theory(AM Theory),Automatic Selective Perception Model and Speech Learning Model,this paper designs phonological experiments for Chinese English learners’ perception and production of disjunctive question sentences.The subjects were divided into a control group(4 native English speakers)and an experimental group(30 Chinese English learners),in which the experimental group was divided into nonEnglish learners(10)and English learners(10 each in the low-level and high-level groups).Firstly,the production experiment was conducted by using Praat,an automatic segmentation software,to segment the recorded audio;secondly,Praat,a general speech analysis software,was used to extend the annotation information to add suprasegmental features;then a specific script file was applied to extract the fundamental frequency data and prosodic feature data at certain intervals;and then the perception experiment was conducted to quantify the test results of the subjects’auditory annotation;finally,the results of the perceptual experiment were assigned and analyzed.Finally,the statistical function of Excel was used to normalize and organize the data,and the experimental results were presented in the form of tables and graphs.The experimental results showed that:1.Chinese English learners’prosodic perception and production differed significantly from those of native speakers,who usually focused on real words and reflected the tendency to judge the boundary tones at the end of antithetical question sentences without clear context as vocal tones.(Chinese English learners,on the other hand,distribute stress relatively randomly,with both real and imaginary words,making it difficult to highlight the focus of the sentence;sentence pauses do not conform to the norms,and case studies show that some learners have long pauses between coronal or definite words and qualifiers;and judge the intonation at the end of some disjunctive question sentences as a descending tone without a clear context);2.The perception and production situation between experimental groups of different English levels also It can be inferred that prosodic perception and production are positively correlated to a certain extent:If.the level of perception is high,the level of production will also be high.Improving prosodic perception can help improve spoken English.In English teaching,the training of English prosodic perception should be emphasized so that students can have a full understanding of the rules of English stress distribution,phonetic intonation and prosodic division,which will not only help further develop students’ sense of speech,but also improve their listening and speaking skills.