Aoa Effects On Foreign Language Prosody Among Chinese Children

Age of acquisition(AoA)refers to the starting age of foreign language learning in the field of second language or foreign language acquisition.Whether AoA has influence on foreign language phonological acquisition for English as a foreign language(EFL)learners has long been the focus of scholars at home and abroad.Phonology is mainly composed of segmental and suprasegmental features.In particular,the suprasegmental or prosodic features that constitute an important part of phonological production are crucial in foreign language communication.Studies concerning AoA effects on foreign language phonological acquisition have obtained inconsistent results.Some research revealed an age effect on foreign language phonological acquisition,supporting the “earlier-is-better”proposition or “later-is-better” notion.Some studies found no age effect on phonological aspect.So far,most foreign language research mainly aims at the segmental features,while empirical studies concerning AoA effects on suprasegmental features are far from adequate.Moreover,under the foreign language context in China,there are few studies of AoA effects on foreign language prosody aimed at childhood EFL learners.The current study attempted to investigate the relationship between different AoAs and various English prosodic categories including speech and articulation rate,total pitch accents,segmenting of intonation phrases,and different types of pitch accents,phrase accents and boundary tones.This paper focuses on three research questions:(1)Are there AoA effects on the production of foreign language English prosody for Chinese children?(2)If so,which prosodic categories(speech rate,articulation rate,pitch accents,phrase accents and boundary tones)are impacted by the age effect?(3)What is the relationship between various AoAs and different prosodic categories(speech rate,articulation rate,pitch accents,phrase accents and boundary tones)? This study applied the English prosody evaluation method and data analysis used in the study by Huang & Jun(2011).Data from different AoA samples were compared with those of native English speakers.This study selected 70 students from a primary school in Beijing as subjects.They were required to read the same speech material and meanwhile their oral readings were recorded.Then,the researcher applied Praat to produce the pitch contours and perform the ToBI labeling on Praat.Based on the data analysis,the results show that:(1)Correlation analysis showed that the number of pitch accents,intermediate phrases,and the frequency of the categories: downstepped peak accent !H*,low accent L*,highphrase accent H-,and two boundary types L-H%(low phrase accent followed by high boundary tone,rising to a less high point),and H-H%(high phrase accent followed by high boundary tone,rising to a very high point)were negatively correlated with AoA.It suggested that the later the AoA was,the fewer the phrase segments,and relevant accent and tone types were produced by EFL learners.(2)Based on their AoA(3 years old,4 years old,5 years old and 6 years old),participants were divided into four groups: Group A,Group B,Group C,Group D.The further ANOVA analysis with prosodic categories as the dependent variables and AoA groups as the factor variables demonstrated AoA effects on some types of pitch accent(!H*,L*)and phrase accent(H-).Later EFL learners performed significantly better than earlier EFL learners in downstepped peak accent !H*(p <.01),and moderately better than earlier EFL learners in low pitch L* and high phrase accent H-(ps <.05).The results demonstrated that among the four EFL groups,Group A(AoA = 3 years),namely the earliest group,overused H* and L* to stress the syllables in the sentences,and high phrase accent H-to segment the intonation phrase.(3)AoA effects were not found on speech rate,articulation rate,and intonation phrase segmenting(IPs and ips)as well as the other accent and tone types.All the four EFL groups had a much slower rate than the native English speaker(NES)group,and produced a significantly larger number of intermediate phrases(ips)than the NES group,whereas only learners with AoA = 3 years had a significantly higher frequency of intonation phrases(IPs)than the NES group.The results indicated that EFL learners frequently divided the intonation unit(IP)into shorter units(ips),each unit containing fewer words but costing longer time,with irregular pauses.It could be inferred that EFL learners need to spend more time in extracting and processing the rhythmic information.As for the rest prosodic categories,all the four EFL groups produced a significantly larger number of pitch accents(e.g.,H* and L-)than the NES group.For learners with AoA = 3 years,they used more pitch accents than the other three EFL groups,applied more H* and L-than learners with AoA = 4 years,and employed more H-H% than the NES group.The results implied that EFL learners excessively employed H* and L-in stressing and segmenting respectively,and the earliest EFL learners in particular overused inappropriate high boundary tones H-H%.To conclude,the results mainly show two patterns:(1)There were age effects on foreign language prosodic aspects among Chinese children,but later learners produced thesimilar frequency of some prosodic categories(H*,L*,H-)to that of native English speakers,while earlier learners produced a significantly higher frequency of the three accent types than native speakers.(2)EFL learners regardless of earlier or later beginners,were significantly different from native English speakers in such prosodic aspects as speech rate,articulation rate,the number of pitch accents and ips,H*,and L-.This study confirmed AoA effects on foreign language prosody,but found the later starting advantage in prosody acquisition.Meanwhile,compared with the NES group,there are some obvious problems in some prosodic categories for Chinese EFL learners.Teachers should further strengthen the explicit instruction on students’ English suprasegmental or prosodic features and offer specific corrective suggestions.The study results have important implications for scientifically understanding the relationship between AoA and foreign language phonological acquisition and the starting time of foreign language learning.