An Acoustic Study On The Production Of Word-Medial Stops By Chinese EFL Learners

In the field of second language acquisition,researchers have long been interested in the production of stops by English learners.Previous studies have shown that the production of stops by English learners is more acoustically similar to the learners’ native tongue,indicating that learners have not correctly understood the contrast of English stops.However,most of these studies only used VOT as the main variable of interest and focused on stops in simple phonetic environments,leaving room for improvement.This thesis investigates the production of stops by Chinese EFL learners when reading continuous and meaningful articles aloud,measuring closure duration,burst duration,and voicing proportion to describe the level of acquisition of learners.This study seeks to find out how proficiency,segmental factors,and contextual factors affect Chinese EFL learners’ performance.A production experiment was conducted.Twenty-nine participants from Beijing Foreign Studies University took part in this experiment.They were asked to read 5 short English articles aloud while being recorded.The recordings were processed and measured for the three parameters.The results were analyzed using statistical methods,and were discussed within the theoretical frameworks of SLM and PAM.Results showed that there was no significant difference in the production of stops between intermediate and advanced learners.However,participants overall showed good differentiation of English stops over closure,burst,and voicing.Other factors did have a significant effect on the learners’ production.These results indicate that Chinese English learners have acquired the opposition of English stops in continuous speech and demonstrated UC Type of assimilation.This study provides new evidence for research in the field of second language speech acquisition and offers practical suggestions for English pronunciation teaching.