A Study On The Effects Of Gender And Language Proficiency On Phonetic Accommodation In Chinese EFL Learners

Phonetic accommodation is ubiquitous in speech communication in our daily lives.It refers to the phenomenon that speakers change their way of speaking to attune to someone they talk with.There are three types of accommodation including convergence,divergence,and maintenance,among which convergence(i.e.,adaptation of speech towards the partner)was most extensively studied.Phonetic accommodation plays an important role in cross-linguistic/cultural speech communication.Previous literature shed light on English as a Foreign Language(EFL)learning and teaching,but most studies were conducted with a non-interactive laboratory task instead of an interactive conversation.Based on the Communication Accommodation Theory,the present study examined the phonetic accommodation of Chinese EFL learners and explored the proficiency and gender effect on accommodation.The Diapix task was employed to elicit spontaneous conversational speech.Chinese EFL learners with advanced,intermediate,and elementary proficiency as well as an American native English speaker were recruited.Five target vowels,/i/,/u/,/(?)/,/ɑ/,/(?)/,were put into contexts of /h Vt/and /h Vd/.Finally,ten target words were embedded in the Diapix task.Chinese EFL learners conversed with the native speaker in English to complete the Diapix task.Additionally,they were asked to read the ten words before and after the task.Acoustic parameters of vowel duration,mean F0,and formant frequencies were extracted and processed.Adjusted phonetic change and difference in IS were employed in calculating the phonetic accommodation.The results show overall phonetic convergence on these acoustic parameters to a certain degree.Both proficiency and gender of Chinese EFL learners influence accommodation.For duration,higher proficiency learners converge more than lower ones.For mean F0 and formant frequencies,female learners converge more than male learners.For “F1×F2” space,there is an interaction effect between gender and language proficiency.That is,female converged less than male in advanced learners,whereas female converged more than male in lower-proficiency learners.In sight of the above findings,it is suggested that attention should be paid to the interlocutor in oral practice or the narrator of speech material to better match with the gender and language proficiency of Chinese EFL learners to induce stronger phonetic accommodation.