Analysis Of Acoustic Features Of English Fricatives By Tianjin Speakers

Acquisition of fricatives is an important part of second language acquisition research.Under the framework of Speech Learning Model,this study intends to find out the influence of the consonant system in a first language on the acquisition of a second language by analyzing the acoustic features of English fricatives spoken by Tianjin English learners.This study selects audio files of 10 Tianjin English learners(gender balanced)and 10 native English speakers(gender balanced)from the corpora of Global TIMIT(L1＿Tianjin)and Global TIMIT(L1＿English).Duration,center of gravity,and dispersion of fricatives in continuous speech are extracted to examine the acquisition of fricatives that are identical,new or similar in English and Tianjin Dialect.Findings are as follows.(1)Tianjin English learners have different performances in duration in identical,new or similar fricatives.Specifically,the duration of identical fricatives changes as their following vowels change,and there is no significant difference between Tianjin English learners and native English speakers in duration of the identical sounds.For the new sound,Tianjin English learners tend to shorten its duration;while for similar sounds,they tend to lengthen their duration.(2)With regard to the spacial distribution features of English fricatives,the values of center of gravity and dispersion of the English fricatives of Tianjin English learners are generally smaller than those of native English speakers.That is,when pronouncing English fricatives,the place of articulation of Tianjin English learners is generally further back than that of native speakers,and their friction gap is not as small as natives’.The degree of friction by Tianjin English learners is much lower than that by native English speakers.In terms of the degrees of acquisition of the three types of English fricatives,Tianjin English learners present the following pattern: “the new fricative > identical fricatives > similar fricatives”.The result partly validates the hypotheses in the Speech Learning Model,that is,from the aspect of the two acoustic features of center of gravity and dispersion of fricatives,the acquisition condition of Tianjin English learners is in accordance with the forecast of the model,while in terms of duration,there is no evident rule and it needs further study.This study complements the study on fricatives in second language acquisition,and provides evidence for future research on L2 fricatives’ acquisition influenced by dialects.The study will also offer some references for English phonetic teaching in Tianjin.