Prosodic Features Of Chinese Wh-Questions By American English Speakers

Intonation,as one of the key topics of linguistic studies,has attracted much attention.In order to observe the intonation characteristics of Chinese wh-questions produced by American English speakers in a more natural discourse context,this study intends to explore it from the following four aspects: pitch,duration,accent distributions and boundary tones.Under the guidance of the Autosegmental-Metrical Theory,this study analyzes the intonation features of Chinese wh-questions by American Chinese as a Foreign Language(CFL)learners.Ten American CFL learners with an intermediate-mid to advance-mid level in ACTFL test and ten native Mandarin Chinese speakers(both gender balanced)are chosen as participants.Their recordings of four Chinese interrogatives and three English wh-questions are from the Global TIMIT corpus.Findings are as follows:(1)Compared with native Mandarin speakers,American CFL learners’ full ranges are 0.08t-1.7t narrower in the four wh-questions,but the differences are not significant.(2)Among the four wh-questions,the pitch ranges of American CFL learners in the position of wh-words are narrower than those of native Mandarin speakers,and the pitch ranges of the wh-words’ adjacent syllables do not show regular differences.(3)Compared with native Mandarin speakers,American CFL learners’ total duration of the whole sentences are 35%-60% longer,and the pause rate is between 11%-17%,much higher than the 0.6%-6.5% of native Mandarin speakers.(4)The accent distributions of American CFL learners are more scattered.Besides,in the Chinese wh-question with a sentence-initial or a sentence-medial wh-word,the proportion of American CFL learners who tend to use rising tones at the end of a sentence is lower than native Mandarin speakers.Through analyzing the features of the Mandarin interrogative intonation acquisition of American CFL learners,the present study finds that the rising of pitch and the lengthening of duration in the position of sentence-final syllables,wh-words and its adjacent syllables contribute to correctly distinguishing accent distributions of the two groups.Such findings,if used in teaching Chinese as a foreign language,may improve the production of learners’ prosody.