Rhythm Patterns In The Speech Of Chinese EFL Learners

English has traditionally been classified into stress-timed language. Stess-timed rhythm is said to occur when stressed syllables occur in the stream of speech isochronously, just like "morse-code". However, Chinese is long regarded as syllable-timed language. In syllable-timed rhythm stressed syllables, acoustically, are not perceived stronger than unstressed syllables. When the syllables, whether stressed or not, occur isochronously, or at equal intervals of time, just like "machine-gun", syllable-stressed rhythm occurs. Therefore, English and Chinese are very different in rhythm and consequently it becomes a huge challenge for most of Chinese EFL learners.This paper is concerned with the rhythm patterns in the speech of Chinese EFL learners, especially those with Hangzhou dialect. By focusing on the prominence and timing pattern, it compared the rhythmic differences in English reading speech between English natives and Chinese EFL learners. With the help of second language acquisition theories, Chinese dialectology and phonetic methodology, it also analyzed and interpreted the underlying reasons for the problems observed from the rhythm acquisition of Chinese EFL learners. It aims to facilitate the English phonetic teaching, establish an automatic English pronunciation evaluation system and provide acoustic parameters for speech engineering.The main content focuses on three aspects:rhythm metrics, rhythmic hierarchy and stress patterns.The dissertation first analyzed the differences in rhythm types between Chinese EFL learners’ mother language---Hangzhou dialect, their well-familiared language---Mandarin and British natives’ English by comparing the different metric values according to Ramus’ IM model and Grabe’s Pairwise Variability Index model. Then, it further investigated the differences in rhythm timing between natives and non-natives, aiming to make clear the underlying influence of different rhythm types on second language rhythm acquisition.Second, it started from the rhythmic hierarchy and compared the differences in rhythmic units, rhythmic boundaries, and the corresponding relationships between rhythmic hierarchy, syntactic hierarchy as well as timing hierarchy, produced by Chinese EFL learners and English natives.At last, based on the information of total number and position of produced stress, as well as its acoustic parameters and distribution, the paper analysed the differences in the stress pattern of Chinese EFL learners and English natives.The database used in this study is AESOP-CASS Chinese EFL learners from Wu dialectal area. It chose over1-minute discourse text as main research material, which makes it a large scale investigation among some similar phonetic researches. Meanwhile, it limited the dialect background of the informants and pre-evaluated their English proficiency, thus making the results more reliable and linking the subjective evaluation and objective results together. Moreover, methodologically, this study applied newly-developed speech tools like SPASS and TGA, to facilitate the heavy manual work during the annotating process and speech rhythm analyzing, and also generate more accurate and objective analysis results based on a large speech database One more thing to notice is that this study is not merely a phonetic study. By observing the rhythm pattern of Chinese EFL learners and English natives, it aims to seek the corresponding relationship between properties of the phonetic realizations and the underlying language categories, linking the phonetic, syntactic and semantic dimensions toghther.The main conclusion of this dissertation is, in order to produce acceptable English rhythm, Chinese EFL learners are supposed to acquire the variation in vocalic length between stressed and unstressed syllables; to use pragmatic criteria to successfully parse rhythmic units:to appropriately apply the attraction and repulstion force at different rhythmic boundaries, and to accurately and moderately produce stress based on speech information strcutre.