On The Prosodic Patterns Of Wh-questions In Chinese And English

Prosody is one of the most important features of language and the vitalconstituent of spoken language. The acquisition of the prosodic patterns of a targetlanguage determines the quality of the acquired target system and the communicationin the language. Wh-questions are one of the most frequently used syntactic structuresin any language, therefore their prosodic features and the articulatory mechanism torealize its function are worth investigating for the teaching, learning and researchingof the prosodic patterns of language. Chinese and English are the two most widelyspoken languages in the world, and in China, we have the largest number of Englishlearners while outside China, there are an increasing number of Chinese learners fromdifferent parts of the world. However, comparative prosodic studies of Chinese andEnglish wh-questions are sparse and the relevant systematic and experimental studiesare little. Based on these theoretical and practical needs, the present study focuses onthe prosodic patterns of wh-questions in Chinese and English and Chinese EFLlearners’ acquisition of the prosodic patterns of English wh-questions. Mainly, itintends to address the following research questions:⑴What are the prosodic patterns of wh-questions in English?⑵What are the prosodic patterns of wh-questions in Chinese?⑶What are the similarities and differences in the prosodic patterns ofwh-questions between Chinese and English?⑷To what extent can Chinese EFL learners acquire the prosodic patterns ofwh-questions?The subjects of the present study were four Received Pronunciation (RP)speakers, four standard Chinese Mandarin (CM) speakers, and twenty Chineselearners of English as a foreign language (EFL). All of them were invited to readaloud the wh-questions in both English and Chinese. The data were recorded viaCool Edit Pro V2.1at the sound booth in the phonetics laboratory, in JiangsuUniversity of Science and Technology and in Cambridge University respectively. Therecorded data were then annotated and analyzed by the researchers via Praat software 5240-win32. Finally, the statistic data generated from Praat scripts were analyzed byExcel.The results of data analysis reveal the following major findings:1)In English, all RP speakers tend to regard the whole sentence as oneintonation phrase. When articulating the wh-questions in this present study,most of the RP speakers place their nuclear accent on the final words.90%of RP speakers have an H*+L tone on nuclear accent while10%of RPspeakers have an L*+H tone on nuclear accent.2)In Chinese, when articulating regular wh-questions, all MC (MandarinChinese) speakers tend to regard the wh-questions as two intonation phrases;while33.3%of MC speakers tend to regard the irregular wh-questions asone intonation phrase. For tonicity, the nuclear accent mainly falls on thewh-words and verb words. Although there are different nuclear accents,about84%of MC speakers tend to have an H*+L tone on nuclear accent.3)There are some similarities and differences in the prosodic patterns ofwh-questions between English and Chinese. Both of the RP speakers andMC speakers have a tendency to put their nuclear accent on the verb wordand have the same tone as H*+L on nuclear accent. In English, all RPspeakers tend to utter the wh-questions as one intonation pattern while inChinese,20%of MC speakers tend to pronounce the equivalent Chinesewh-questions as one intonation phrase, too.90%of RP speakers have anH*+L tone on nuclear accent while10%of RP speakers have an L*+H toneon nuclear accent.82%of the MC speakers have an H*+L tone on thenuclear accent while18%of MC speakers have an L*+H tone on nuclearaccent.4)As for the acquisition of the prosodic patterns of English wh-questions, mostof the Chinese EFL learners prefer to use a falling tone (H*+L) no matterwhat position the nuclear accent is placed in the sentence. The majorproblem of Chinese EFL learners is that some of them place their nuclearaccent on wh-words and have a tendency to stress other words when articulating the wh-questions, which attach a strong Chinglish to theproduction of L2wh-questions. This can be largely accounted for by thenegative transfer from the prosodic patterns of wh-questions in Chinese as atonal language.The findings in the present study shed light on the better understanding of theprosodies of both English and Chinese and how to learn and teach English andChinese as a second language respectively. The prosodic variation or problemsperformed by Chinese EFL learners indicate the difficult part in acquisition of Englishprosody as one of the main aspects which requires special attention in thesupra-segmental learning and teaching. Therefore, a contrastive analysis of Englishand Chinese wh-questions’ prosodic patterns is highly recommended and brings aboutsuccessful and effective learning and teaching of English and Chinese prosody as asecond language.