A Contrastive Study Of Intonational Features Of Wh-Questions Between English Learners From Northeast China And American Native Speakers

Intonation plays a crucial role in English learning.As Wells said,our language without intonation would be monotonous and boring.Based on the Theory of “Three Ts” and the Auto-segmental Metrical Theory,this thesis analyzes the intonational features of English learners from Northeast China and those of American native speakers when reading wh-questions through an acoustic experiment.Then the thesis discusses the differences existing in the intonational features between the two groups of people.At the same time,the possible reasons for the differences are explored as well.The thesis attempts to answer the following research questions:1)What are the intonational features of wh-questions of English Learners from Northeast China and those of Ameican native speakers?2)What are the differences existing in the intonational features between the two groups of subjects?3)What are the possible reasons accounting for the differences?The research data in this thesis were selected from the AESOP-CASS(Asian English Speech Corpus Project-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)corpus.Twelve English learners from Northeast China(Harbin,Shenyang,and Changchun,each with two men and two women)and twelve American native speakers(six men and six women)were randomly selected as research subjects.Eleven wh-questions were selected as research materials,which were classified into three types in the thesis.The research data were annotated and extracted through the labeling system combining To BI and IVi E.Meanwhile,to ensure accuracy,the relevant data were normalized.The findings of the study are as follows:From the perspective of tonality: 1)the number of intonation phrases divided by English learners from Northeast China is greater than that of American native speakers.2)English learners use excessive pauses as IP boundary markers,which impacts the language’s coherence and accuracy of information delivery.American native speakers tend to deploy anacrusis and pitch reset as boundary indicators for IP demarcation,which makes their’ intonation more fluent and rhythmic when reading wh-questions.From the perspective of tonicity: the prominence distribution of English learners is dispersed and inconsistent,while the prominence distribution of American native speakers is much more concentrated and accordant.1)When simple wh-questions become complex wh-questions,the increase of constituents in sentences makes English learners choose more prominent syllables,while American native speakers only adjust the position of prominent syllables.Meanwhile,English learners always choose to emphasize subordinating conjunctions in complex wh-questions,but native speakers do not stress subordinating conjunctions all the time.2)For wh-questions with modifiers,English learners often emphasize both the modifier and the head noun in a wh-question or emphasize the head noun more frequently than the modifier.American native speakers seldom place prominence on the modifier and the head noun simultaneously in a wh-question,and they more frequently stress the modifier or the head noun.3)The majority of English learners choose to put prominence on the prepositions in wh-questions ending with prepositions,while native speakers hardly place prominence on the prepositions.4)English learners always highlight the last words of wh-questions,no matter whether they are the content words or grammatical words.However,almost all native speakers only place emphasis on content words.5)There is no significant difference in the prominence distribution of interrogative words,adjectives,adverbs,and link verbs between English learners and American native speakers,but there is a significant difference in the prominence distribution of nouns,verbs,auxiliary verbs,pronouns,and prepositions.From the perspective of tone: 1)When reading wh-questions,the tonal patterns adopted by English learners are inconsistent,especially in the part of subordinate clauses of complex wh-questions,while the tonal patterns produced by American native speakers are relatively accordant no matter in simple wh-questions or complex wh-questions.Meanwhile,English learners frequently apply tonal patterns with a high boundary tone(H%)on the subordinating conjunctions,while American native speakers may locate tonal patterns with a low boundary tone(L%)or with a high boundary tone(H%)on the subordinating conjunctions.2)Most tonal patterns of the modifiers and head nouns given by English learners are characterized by a low boundary tone(L%),while tonal patterns of American native speakers exhibit a low boundary tone(L%)and a high boundary tone(H%)no matter on the modifiers or the head nouns.3)English learners always adopt a relatively accordant tone accompanied by a low boundary tone(L%)on the prepositions in wh-questions ending with prepositions.Conversely,native speakers may deploy tonal patterns in a variety on the prepositions in the wh-questions.4)Finally,English learners and American native speakers both frequently apply tonal patterns with a low boundary tone(L%)when reading wh-questions.However,native speakers produce tonal patterns characterized by a high boundary tone(H%)on many words as well.The phenomena indicate that the tonal patterns produced by English learners are monotonous,while the tonal patterns of American native speakers are in a variety.Finally,this study analyzes the possible reasons for the differences in three aspects: two different language systems,language transfer,and English teaching and learning: 1)Chinese is a mono-syllabic language belonging to the Chinese-Tibetan language system,while English is categorized as both a single-syllabic and multi-syllabic language of the Germanic language system.Therefore,English learners are used to taking a single word as an intonation group,and they sometimes have difficulty in finding the prominent syllables when reading some English polysyllabic words.Furthermore,Chinese belongs to the tone language,and English belongs to the intonation language.In other words,Chinese intonation is mainly based on the lexical level,while English intonation comes from the sentence level.2)The features of the Northeastern dialect have a negative effect on English learners’ intonation to some extent.It was found that the pitch values of the Northeastern dialect were generally lower than those of Mandarin.As a result,the tonal patterns of the Northeastern dialect are relatively plain and flat.3)In terms of teaching,a large number of students were taught to read wh-questions with a falling tone(L%).However,most English learners tend to produce every single word with a falling tone(L%)of a wh-question,which to some extent,leads to their monotonous tonal patterns.In terms of learning,in the background of the traditional examination-oriented English teaching,students pay less heed to English intonation learning than vocabulary or grammar.Meanwhile,some English learners use “pinyin” or Chinese characters with similar pronunciation to label and remember the pronunciation of some English words,which also impacts their intonation.Due to the limitations of the research data and the author’s abilities,this study still needs further discussion and validation.It is hoped that the thesis will be of assistance for future studies in this field,as well as have some implications for English intonation teaching.