An Acoustic Study On Weak Form And Its Implication On Phonetic Learning For Normal University Students

The research did an acoustic investigation on the weak form of some frequently usedfunction words spoken by BBC speakers in rapid and connected English speech. It providedstatistics for current research on weak form and the newly discovered rules remedied the oldones.Since it is the function words that often have weak form, the author picked up thefollowing words as the object of study: to, as, at, but, from, for, of. The research aimed only atone kind of weak forms: the vowel in the function words weakened into schwa. ChoosingBBC News as acoustic material, the author extracted the first and second vowel formants ofweak form by Praat and compared them with those of strong form. After analyzing with SPSS,there are some conclusions. Firstly, function words are weakened in most cases, whichimplicates that it is a characteristic for native speakers to use weak form in rapid speech.Secondly, a function word can have different kinds of weak forms under the influences ofdifferent adjacent words. It is also accompanied with liaison. What is more, when in initialposition in a sentence, the function words will not be weakened, whereas not necessarily bewhen in the sentence. There is no discipline providing a function word should be weakened.Besides, the mean F1of vowels in weak forms is409HZ, F2is1634HZ.Based on the research on the BBC speakers, the author also did acoustic investigationon English majors in normal universities. To begin with, the mean F1is higher while themean F2is close to that of BBC speakers. Additionally, the mean duration is fairly longer thanthat of BBC speakers. Besides, most of function works are not weakened, which implicatesthat Chinese students are not used to using weak form. As for the strong form, the formantvalues are varied, which means there are little rules and of great arbitrariness when speaking.Moreover, reduction and epentheses are occasionally seen.In order to find out the reasons, the author did a survey of200junior and senior studentsin two normal universities. The author found that only45%of students knew what the weak form was, showing that most of students do not know how to apply it in oral communication.And it also mirrors the shortages of teaching. After investigating these45%of students, theauthor found the two main reasons which hinder students to apply weak form. One is that theteaching of weak form has not been given emphasis. The other is the influences of mothertongue. The weak form in English and untoned in Chinese share similar causes, but they areslightly different in formant values. This makes weak form easy to be understood but hard tobe applied.On the basis of previous research, the author proposed the teaching significance andmethod for Normal University students and teenagers respectively.