A Contrastive Study Of Prosodic Disambiguation Of Ambiguous Sentences Between Shenyang EFL Learners And Native English Speakers

In daily communication,prosody is very important.Only by using prosody correctly,can we accurately express our thinking or perceive speakers’ intention.Therefore,the study of prosody has attracted more and more attention.But the research on prosodic disambiguation is still insufficient.Few scholars have combined prosodic production with prosodic perception in their researches,and there is still a vacancy in the research on prosodic disambiguation of English learners,especially learners in a specific dialectal area.This thesis,therefore,conducts a contrastive study of prosodic disambiguation of ambiguous sentences between Shenyang EFL learners and native English speakers.By comparing the prosodic disambiguation of ambiguous sentences between Shenyang English learners and native English speakers,this study mainly answers the following three questions:1.What are the differences of prosodic disambiguation between Shenyang English learners and native English speakers in sentence production? What are the reasons for their differences?2.What are the differences of prosodic disambiguation between Shenyang English learners and native English speakers in sentence perception? What are the reasons for their differences?3.What is the relationship between the production and perception of prosodic disambiguation of Shenyang English learners and native English speakers respectively? What are the differences between the two groups?From the perspective of experimental phonetics,this study designs two phonetic experiments: production experiment and perception experiment.The production experiment selects 6 pairs of ambiguous sentences,including 3 pairs of syntactically ambiguous sentences,2 pairs of pragmatically ambiguous sentences and 1 pair of temporarily ambiguous sentences read by 12 native English speakers and 12 Shenyang English learners in two contexts from the AESOP-CASS corpus as the research materials.First,the prosodic production of the two groups of subjects is rated and the context effect is calculated to measure how successful speakers are in producing sentences that distinguish their intended meanings.Then,each recorded audio is segmented and labeled by the automatic segmentation software Praat,and Prosody Pro is used to extract four prosodic parameters of pitch,duration,pause and intensity in the two contexts.Last,paired t-test is performed on the production data with SPSS.The experimental materials of the perception experiment are 44 half sentences synthesized on the basis of a pair of temporarily ambiguous sentences read by a native speaker in the AESOP corpus and 3 unambiguous filler stimuli.Firstly,the software Wavepad is used to cut them and only the first halves with the critical items have remained,and then Prosody Pro is used to yield three kinds of prosodic conditions,including the all cues condition,the no cue condition and the single cue condition,to test the general use of prosodic cues.And then a script written by Xiong Ziyu is used to replace the pitch,duration and pause of the ambiguous critical items in the two sentences to test the detailed use of prosodic cues.Then twelve Shenyang English learners(6 men and 6 women)and twelve native English speakers(6 men and 6women)are asked to listen to each first half of the temporarily ambiguous sentence and then to choose the following part of the sentence.Finally,SPSS is used to do paired t-test on the data under all cues,single cue and no cue conditions,and to do binary logistic regression analysis on the data obtained under the conflicting cues condition.The research results are as follows:The production experiment answers the first research question.Generally speaking,both groups have a better performance on temporary ambiguity than syntactic ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity than pragmatic ambiguity.Native English speakers are better than learners in resolving syntactic ambiguity,pragmatic ambiguity and temporary ambiguity.They can stably generate corresponding prosodic cues to help listeners resolve the three types of ambiguity.But for learners,the disambiguation of temporary ambiguity depends on their understanding of sentence structure and meaning.Most learners can distinguish the differences between the two sentences,so they can provide enough prosodic information for listeners to resolve temporary ambiguity.The disambiguation of syntactic ambiguity also depends on their understanding of sentence structure and meaning.Only when learners can distinguish the differences between the two sentences,can they produce prosody that is conducive for listeners to resolve syntactic ambiguity.In syntactically ambiguous sentences,when there is no punctuation to help distinguish the meaning of a sentence,nearly all learners are not aware of the existence of ambiguity in the sentence.When a pair of ambiguous sentences with punctuation and without punctuation exist at the same time,most learners can distinguish the semantic differences between some sentences,which shows that punctuation is an effective means to help learners distinguish sentence meaning.But the role of punctuation in disambiguation depends on learners’ understanding of syntactic structure and semantic meaning.For pragmatic ambiguity,even though learners can understand the sentence structures and meanings of the two sentences,they still can not provide enough prosodic cues to resolve pragmatic ambiguity and the prosodic cues they use are not consistent.The poor performance on prosodic disambiguation in pragmatically ambiguous sentences is mainly due to their insufficient phonological knowledge.Besides,as for the prosodic cues used as the means of disambiguation,except for temporarily ambiguous sentences,learners use fewer prosodic cues than native speakers.Learners primarily use pause to resolve syntactic ambiguity and pitch to resolve pragmatic ambiguity.Whereas native speakers use a combination of pitch,duration,pause and intensity to resolve syntactic ambiguity and pitch,duration and intensity to resolve pragmatic ambiguity.Even if learners and native speakers use the same prosodic cues,learners’ variation range of prosodic cues is smaller than that of native speakers.In temporarily ambiguous sentences,both native speakers and learners use a combination of pitch,duration and pause to resolve temporary ambiguity.But learners tend to use larger pitch variations to resolve temporary ambiguity,and the variation range of duration and pause is smaller than that of native speakers.The perception experiment answers the second research question.Firstly,the response accuracy of both groups under the four single cue conditions is slightly lower than that under the all cues condition,but significantly higher than that under the no cue condition.That shows that both learners and native speakers use more than one prosodic cue when they perceive ambiguity.Secondly,both groups prefer to choose context A over context B in the prosodic perception experiment,reflecting the trend of early closure.Thirdly,learners and native speakers differ in their perception of prosodic boundaries in the conflicting cues condition.Native speakers use pitch,duration and pause cues to perceive boundaries with pitch having the greatest weight,while learners mainly use two cues,pause and duration,with pause having the greatest weight.The third research question is the relationship between production and perception.There is a consistency between the production and perception of prosodic cues for native speakers,while learners’ use of prosodic cues may depend on different stages of learning,showing an asynchronous development of prosodic production and perception.The reason that Shenyang EFL learners do not perform as well as native English speakers in prosodic disambiguation may be due to the interference of their mother tongue,or insufficient training in English prosody.Therefore,this study calls for adding prosodic teaching to phonetic teaching to help learners establish the relation between prosody and meaning.This paper combines the prosodic disambiguation training method of Jackson & O’Brien with EVF and proposes a seven-step prosody teaching method suitable for Chinese English learners,that is,sensitization,discussion,explanation,practice,comparison,repeated imitation,communicative activities,hoping to improve learners’ production and perception of English prosody.