An Experimental Study On Cross-Language Transfer Of Phonetic And Phonological Knowledge And Skills Of Bidialect Speakers In Guangdong Province

According to Cummins' Common Underlying Proficiency(CUP) Hypothesis,the phonetic and phonological skills and knowledge acquired in the first language(L1) will benefit phonetic and phonological learning of the second language(L2).This study tries to investigate by three experiments whether or not the phonetic and phonological proficiency Chinese bidialect speakers gained from their second dialect acquisition can transfer to English pronunciation learning.We tested two groups of subjects:monodialect group with 40 subjects who can only speak one dialect,bidialect group with 40 subjects who can speak more than two dialects.Software iTutor, English native speaker and New Zealand TESOL(Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) qualified teacher Mrs.Janice Cowen rated the 22 sentences read by the two groups of subjects in terms of consonants,vowels,word stress,and intonation.Software Speech Analysis(SA) analyzed 12 pure vowels uttered by the two groups.The results rated by iTutor showed insignificant difference between the two groups(p＞0.05),Mrs.Janice Cowen also did not provide clear evidence for the difference of the two groups(p＞0.05).Although SA could find significant differences between two groups in the duration of vowels/u/(p＜0.05),/a/(p＜0.05), /∧/(p＜0.01) and /e/(p＜0.01),which reveals that monodialect group could differentiate the duration of short vowels and long vowels better;and in the quality of vowel/(?)/(P=0.05),which indicates monodialect group pronounced/(?)/significantly higher than bidialect group did,these differences,according to our investigation,are caused by the influence of the first dialect and the effect of the second dialect is not obvious.Therefore,this research did not support the hypothesis that Chinese bidialect speakers who profit from their second Chinese dialect are superior in English pronunciation.We think lack of strong motivation and insufficient exposure to English language environment hamper the phonetic and phonological proficiency transfer from bidialect acquisition to English pronunciation learning.