A Contrastive Study Of The Tonality Patterns Of A Passage Read In Chinese And English

This thesis reports an experimental study of the tonality patterns of a passageread by four British Received Pronunciation (RP) speakers, four Standard ChineseMandarin speakers and twelve advanced Chinese EFL university learners from bothimpressionistic and acoustic perspectives. The main purpose of the research is togenerate a deep theoretical understanding of the tonality patterns of Chinese andEnglish languages respectively and find out how Chinese EFL learners realize theirtonality patterns of English in the passage so as to achieve acontrastive-analysis-based exploration of the teaching and learning of L2Englishintonation by tertiary university students in China.Based on the standard parallel speech corpus collected from University ofCambridge (UC) and Jiangsu University of Science and Technology (JUST),experimental phonetics and contrastive phonological methods were adopted to collectdata and analyze data. Specifically, the present paper intends to address the followingfour research questions from both impressionistic and acoustic perspectives:（1）What are the intonation patterns of a reading passage in English?（2）What are the intonation patterns of a reading passage in Chinese?（3）What are the similarities and differences in the intonation patterns of areading passage between English and Chinese?（4）To what extent can Chinese EFL learners acquire the intonation patterns of areading passage in English?The subjects of the present study were three groups of participants.4British RPspeakers (2male and2female) from Cambridge University, who were consideredstandard English speakers;4standard Chinese speakers (2male and2female), whowere news announcers and Chinese national Mandarin testers;12first-yearpostgraduates majoring in linguistics at Jiangsu University of Science and Technologyas a sample of Chinese EFL learners, with average age of24years (6males and6females). None of EFL learners had ever visited or stayed in English speakingcountries and all had learned English for over12years. As all of them had passedTEM8, a national official English proficiency Test for English majors, they could be regarded as advanced Mandarin EFL learners in China and hence their tonalitypatterns of English can be assumed to present some typical tonality features of L2English to some extent.The material for the experiment was from Parallel Standardized PhoneticChinese-English Speech Corpus. The corpus was read by British RP speakers andstandardized Chinese speakers. The content of the corpus included a passage ‘The boywho cried wolf’, a widely adopted material in the field of English phonetics, consistedof10sentences,217words,274syllables and709segments. And the Chinese versionhas12sentences,310prosodic words and310syllables.The subjects were asked to read the material in the standard sound-proof studiovia Cool Edit2.1and have their reading recorded in the phonetics labs at UC andJUST. The recorded data were then acoustically annotated and analyzed via Praat5.1.3.0and statistically measured via Excel and SPSS.The major findings of the data analysis are as follows:(1) Intonation patterns of a reading passage in EnglishIn English,(i) In sentences containing phrases, British RP speakers tend to setintonation boundary in line with the syntactic boundary.(ii) Furthermore, in all thesesentences containing phrases, British RP speakers mainly use not only pause, but alsopitch reset to signal boundaries between two IPs.(2) Intonation patterns of a reading passage in ChineseIn Chinese,(i) all standard Mandarin speakers prefer to take a phrase as oneintonation phrase (IP) in line with syntactic boundary.(ii) In Chinese, standardMandarin speakers tend to choose a pause to signal boundaries between two IPs.(3) Similarities and differences in the intonation patterns between English andChineseSimilarities:(i) for Tonality, almost all RP speakers and standard Mandarinspeakers tend to take the phrases as one IPs. The phrases have simple syntax, whichconsist of adverbs, phrase adverbs, participle phrases, infinitive phrases or clause. Allthese phrases are independent sense-groups; especially they are followed by a comma,so speakers can read them fluently and easily without the possibility to divide them.(ii) The average duration of pause is almost the same. The average pause duration ofStandard Chinese learners is0.602seconds, while that of the British RP speakers is0.620seconds.Differences:(i) In Mandarin, there are more IPs. It shows that the occurrence of IPs in Standard Chinese speakers’ is more than that of British RP speakers’.(ii) Lesssyllables in an Intonation Phrase. In this study, IP basically refers to prosodic units atphrase level or units just smaller than utterance. Standard Chinese speakers’ IP isshorter than that of the native speakers. In this study, the reading material is nearly thesame for both Chinese participants and the native speakers, but there are more IPs inChinese participants’ production. The number of syllables in each IP as produced byBritish RP speakers is more than that of standard Chinese speakers.(note: heresyllables refer to the individual words in the Mandarin corpus, words refer to theindividual words in the English corpus, because Mandarin is a mono-syllabiclanguage, while English is mostly multi-syllabic).(iii) Shorter IP. The length of IP isquite different. In this study, IP basically refers to prosodic units at phrase level orunits just smaller than utterance. Standard Chinese learners’ IP is1.09seconds, whilethat of the British RP speakers is1.64seconds.(iv) Longer duration for each syllable.Average syllable length differs. The average syllable length of British RP speakers(0.210seconds), is a little shorter than that of standard Mandarin speakers (0.250seconds). Due to distinct difference between stress-timed language and syllable-timedlanguage, average syllable length is a little different. Stress-timed language speakers,referring to British RP speakers, usually reduce the length of vowels of unstressedsyllable, while syllable-timed language speakers tend to stress every syllable withsame intensity. Standard Mandarin speakers influenced by Chinese, are not aware ofreduction of vowel of unstressed syllable with each syllable fully articulated.(v) AllBritish RP speakers tend to use pause and pitch reset to signal boundaries betweentwo IPs, while standard Mandarin speakers tend to adopt a pause to signal boundariesbetween two IPs. The two others are rarely used.(4) Chinese EFL learners acquire the intonation patterns of a reading passage inEnglish(i) Quantitative features of chunking. There is significantly larger number of IPsin a sentence by Chinese EFL learners. In the respect of chunking patterns read byChinese EFL learners, there are too many unnecessary chunks. The larger number inlearners’ chunks not only clearly indicates the interlanguage features in the learningprocess, but also reflects the influence of their mother language.(ii) Qualitativefeatures of chunking. They are different greatly in the number of pauses. The ChineseEFLs tend to pause more frequently at IP Boundaries, shorter intonation phrases,which means less words in an Intonation Phrase, and longer duration for each word. Most Chinese EFLs are not capable of mastering native way of realizing chunkingdivision. Compared with native speakers, Chinese EFLs chiefly apply temporalapproach to divide chunking; however, their capability of using pitch reset is ratherweak, which is mainly applied to realize division of chunking by British RP speakers.These findings of comparative analysis reveals typical features of Chinese EFLlearners’ intonation patterns, shedding lights into EFL oral teaching and learning inChina, and also providing an efficient way to integrate technology into SLAinstruction by making use of computer-based acoustic analysis software such as Praat.