A Study On The Affective Prosody By Chinese EFL Learners

The prosodic acquisition has long been a question of great interest in the field of second language acquisition(SLA).However,most of the previous studies were conducted,from the perspective of stress prosody,to investigate the performance of prosody at the lexical,utterance,or discourse level,while the affective prosody of second language(L2)learners is seldom studied and it is unclear to what extent they can adjust prosody to appropriately convey affects in the target language.The current paper contributes to the existing literature on the prosodic acquisition by L2 learners from the perspective of affective prosody,by investigating and comparing aspects contributing to perceived vocal affect in the speech of Chinese English as a foreign language(EFL)learners and native English speakers;specifically the acoustic parameters of pitch range and vowel duration.The data were collected from 20 university students and one native English speaker who took part in two recording sessions designed by the author.The results showed that,for the majority of Chinese EFL learners,their pitch range,pitch standard deviation,and vowel duration were respectively narrower,smaller,and shorter than those of native English speakers,which caused their low scores for affective involvement given by the raters;besides,the results of the paired-sample t-tests on Chinese EFL learners’ prosodic parameters between their spontaneous speech and read speech showed that the insufficient affective involvement in their speech was ingrained.Theoretically,this research examined the previous findings on the prosodic acquisition by L2 learners that are mainly based on studies that are conducted from the perspective of stress prosody,by offering a detailed description of the performance of affective prosody in the speech of Chinese EFL learners.Practically,this study proposed a number of pedagogical suggestions concerning learning and teaching English prosody,which are conducive to helping Chinese EFL learners improve their usage of prosody.