A Study On English Rhythmic Pattern Of Chinese EFL Learners

Rhythm is defined in A DICTIONARY OF LINGUISTICS AND PHONETICS (David, C.2008:417) as "the perceived regularity of prominent units in speech". English and Chinese belong to different types of language and show different rhythmic feature. English has been considered to be a stress-timed language while Chinese has been regarded as a syllable-timed language. On account of the large differences in rhythm between English and Chinese, Chinese EFL learners may encounter some difficulties to learn English rhythmic pattern. Based on this kind of rhythmic features, the present study contrasted the English and Chinese rhythmic pattern first, and then explored the Chinese EFL learners’rhythmic pattern under the continuous speech produced by the three groups of ENS, CNS, and EFL.The present study aims to analyze the Chinese EFL learners’rhythmic pattern with the rhythmic metrics. The study includes two experiments. The first is a comparative study on English and Chinese speech rhythm and the second is an acoustic study of Chinese EFL Learners’rhythmic pattern of English. The subjects of the first experiment include ten Chinese native speakers and four English native speakers. There exists ten Chinese EFL learners participated in the second experiment who are the same Chinese native speakers in the first experiment. This study contrasted the rhythmic pattern of Chinese and English at first. On the one hand, it shows that there are differences between Chinese and English rhythmic pattern. On the other hand, because of the Chinese native speaker as well as the Chinese EFL learners are the same subjects, their output of Chinese rhythm and the rhythm of the English is more comparative.Experiment one compared the rhythmic metrics of Chinese and English, and the study shows that there are large differences between English and Chinese Interval Measurements and Pairwise Variability Index. English percentage of vowel duration is obviously lower than that of Chinese, and the whole duration of vowel is lower as well. In contrast, the English standard derivation of consonant duration is higher than the Chinese. At the same time, the English rPVI_C and nPVI_V are significantly higher than the Chinese. That is to say, through the analysis of the rhythmic metrics we found that compared with English, the adjacent vowel or consonant tend to be isochronic in Chinese, such as the length of the Chinese each syllable’s duration is roughly equal. Because there are many differences between the two languages on the rhythm, so the rhythm patterns that produced by Chinese EFL learners may be influenced by their native language. Their rhythmic features may differ from the rhythm of the native language and target language. Based on this assumption, the second experiment studied English rhythm characteristics of Chinese EFL learners, and the results of the first experiment provided the reference data for the second experiment.The second experiment analysis the rhythmic metric of Chinese EFL learners, and compared with the English native speakers rhythm pattern. We found that the rhythm of Chinese EFL learners tend to between the syllable-timing and stress-timing and the Chinese EFL learners adopted a non-native rhythm. Through the analysis of rhythm metrics, we find that (1) speech rate may have certain effect on the Chinese EFL learners’rhythmic pattern; (2) the normalized rhythm metrics Varco_C, Varco_V and %V play a significant place in distinguishing the L2 rhythmic pattern; (3) in terms of vowel reduction and syllable structure, Chinese EFL learners’value of PVI are both lower than that of English native speakers.Furthermore, Chinese EFL learners always affected by their native language so their English rhythmic pattern shows the characteristics as the interlanguage. Due to the lack of vowel reduction and the complex syllable structure of English, Chinese EFL learners cannot learner the English rhythmic pattern appropriately and lead to the lower value of rhythmic metrics.