A Bi-directional Study Of Second Language Learner's Pitch Rhythm

Chinese is a tone language,and English is a non tone language.No matter in tone language or non tone language,there exists a certain pitch mode.The objectives of this study are:(1)Find a set of parameters that reflect the prosody of Chinese and English.(2)Through these parameters to investigate the pitch prosody characteristics of Chinese and English sentences,and compare the differences between the two.(3)Through these parameters to investigate the characteristics of Chinese and English pitch prosodic acquisition,and to compare the differences between the high prosodic features of intermediary pronunciation and their mother tongue and target language.In order to achieve the research objectives,this paper has done the following five aspects:(1)Through the output experiment,recording 6 native speakers of English and 6 native speakers of Chinese pronunciation corpus;the sample size is 9 Chinese and 9 English sentences per person,a total of 216 sentences.(2)In order to investigate the overall trend of Chinese and English pitch curves,an algorithm is designed to find the turning point on the pitch curve.(3)Depending on the turning point,the pitch curve is divided into segments at turning point,starting point and ending point,and the parameters reflecting the trend of the pitch curve are obtained by analyzing each segment: the frequency,amplitude and scope of the turning point.(4)The pitch prosodic features of Chinese and English sentences are investigated by using three parameters of "frequency","amplitude" and "scope",and the differences of pitch prosodic features between Chinese and English sentences are compared.(5)The phonological features of Chinese and English interlanguage sentences are investigated with three parameters of "frequency","amplitude" and "scope",and the differences between Chinese and English interlanguage,mother tongue and target phonological high prosody are compared and analyzed.The results show that:(1)The pitch changes at sentence level,prosodic phrase level and prosodic word level in Chinese are much greater than those in English.It is shown that the turning frequency of sentence pitch curve is high,the amplitude of change is large,and the scope of each segment is small.(2)The pitch change of Chinese interlanguage sentence is more than that of native English produced by the pronunciator,and less than that of Chinese sentence produced by native speaker.The frequency of pitch curve transition is closer to that of Chinese native speakers,and the range of change is smaller than that of Chinese native speakers,and the scope of each paragraph is larger than that of Chinese native speakers.(3)The pitch change of English interlanguage sentences is less than that of native Chinese produced by the pronunciator,and more than that of English sentences produced by native speakers.The frequency of pitch curve transition is closer to that of native Chinese,and the range of change is smaller than that of prosodic units produced by native speakers.The scope of each paragraph is larger than that of Chinese sentences produced by native speakers and smaller than that of English sentences produced by native speakers.The final conclusions are as follows:(1)The pitch prosody of both tonal and non-tonal languages can be studied as a whole.The "frequency","amplitude" and "scope" of pitch variation can be used as important parameters to describe and analyze pitch curves.(2)The pitch curve of Chinese is more varied,while the English pitch curve is more gentle.English,as an intonation language,has little morphological change on the pitch curve and less falling,flat and rising segments.Chinese native speakers have a high frequency of pitch turning in Chinese sentences and a small scope of each turning.English native speakers have a low frequency of pitch turning in English sentences and a large scope of each turning.In terms of the turning range,the whole sentence and prosodic phrases in Chinese are larger than those in English,and the descending range is larger than that in English.The range of each segment of Chinese pitch curve is small and large,while English is large and small.(3)The high prosodic performance of interlanguage lies between the mother tongue and the target language,but the tendency is different.The markedness in the mother tongue or the target language determines the high prosodic characteristics of the interlanguage.Through a two-way study of the pitch and prosodic expressions of Chinese and English,Chinese and English interlanguage,this paper draws a conclusion that the marked features in mother tongue or target language can influence the high-pitch prosodic expressions of interlanguage pronunciation,which is a further development of the marked difference hypothesis.The main innovations of this paper are as follows:(1)Taking pitch curve as a whole,and taking "frequency","amplitude" and "scope" as the parameters of the turning point to examine the pitch curve,this paper provides a new perspective for the study of sentence pitch prosody.(2)Designing algorithm program to deal with pitch data,finding the turning point on the pitch curve and describing the pitch curve based on the turning point is a supplement to the phonetic research methods.(3)The way of two-way research is to expand the contents and methods of interlanguage research.