An Experimental Study Of Percpetion And Production Of English Phrasal Stress By Chinese EFL Learners

Native speakers often find it difficult to understand Chinese EFL learners' spoken English.It is partly due to the rhythmic differences between the two languages,as English is a stress-timed language,while Chinese is a syllable-timed language(Anderson-Hsieh & Venkatagiri,1994).Roach(2000)further pointed out that incorrect stress assignment is the major cause for the unintelligibility of the discourses spoken by foreign learners,and therefore,it should be seriously treated.However,there are not so many empirical studies focusing on Chinese EFL learners' stress assignment,especially on their phrasal stress assignment.For the above reasons,the researcher focuses on Chinese EFL learners' phrasal stress acquisition.The present study involves 30 Chinese EFL learners' perception and production of English phrasal stress and a correlation analysis of the two parts.The experiment includes 6 noun phrases(NP)structures,3 verb phrases(VP)structures and 3 adverbial phrases(AdvP)structures.Cool Edit Pro 12.0 was used for recording the data,Praat5400 was used to annotate the subjects' production of phrasal stress,and SPSS 12.0 was used to carry out the correlation analysis.The present study intends to explore the following four research questions:1.To what extent can Chinese EFL learners produce English phrasal stress?2.To what extent can Chinese EFL learners perceive English phrasal stress?3.Does Chinese EFL learners' perception correlate with their production of English phrasal stress?4.Does Chinese EFL learners' phrasal stress competence correlate with their English proficiency?The following are the results drawn from the data analyses of the experiments:1.Chinese EFL learners' perception of English phrasal stress is quite poor,withan overall correct rate of 30.6% for NPs,67.8% for VPs,and 57.8% for AdvPs.The correct rate of the 6 types of NP structures is 100%,46.7%,18.4%,3.3%,5% and 10%.The correct rate of the 3 types of VP structures is 76.7%,36.7% and 90%.The correct rate of the 3 types of AdvP structures is 50%,26.7% and 46.7%.2.Chinese EFL learners' production of English phrasal stress is not ideal at all,with an overall correct rate of 48.1% for NPs,47.2% for VPs,and 47.8% for AdvPs.The correct rate of the 6 types of NP structures is 73.3%,80%,6.7%,45%,53.4% and30%.The correct rate of the 3 types of VP structures is 20%,21.1% and 78.4%.The correct rate of the 3 types of AdvP structures is 50%,53.3% and 40%.3.The Pearson correlation analysis of Chinese EFL learners' production and perception of English phrasal stress is conducted from two aspects: the correct rate(r=0.618*,Sig.=.032)and the number of stress assignment patterns(r=0.493*,Sig.=.032).The results show that they are significantly correlated,demonstrating the inherent reciprocal effects between perceptive and productive phonetic competence.4.The Pearson correlation analysis of Chinese EFL learners' phrasal stress competence and English proficiency includes two parts: correlation between perception and proficiency(r=0.188,Sig.=.316)and correlation between production and proficiency(r=0.112*,Sig.=.041).The results show that they are not significantly correlated with each other overall.The findings of the present study shed light on some problems in the acquisition of L2 phonetics.First,Chinese EFL learners' phrasal stress assignment is strongly affected by their L1 stress assignment patterns as an evidence of prominent L1 negative transfer.Second,Chinese EFL learners tend to stress function words,such as auxiliaries,modal verbs and articles,but leave content words unstressed,such as nouns,verbs,adjectives and adverbs.This also demonstrates the prevailing L1 negative transfer.Third,Chinese EFL learners tend to stress every word in a phrase,ignoring the hierarchy of information status.This can be traced back to the syllable-timed rhythm of Mandarin.Fourth,Chinese EFL learners have no idea of the general stress principles of target L2 English in broad focus.This demonstrates the importance of phonetic awareness of target language in the acquisition of L2 English.Finally,the more complicated thephrase structures are,the more difficulties or variations L2 learners will encounter in both perceptive and productive phonetic realizations of the stress patterns of the structures.No doubt,the findings will provide insightful implications for the teaching and learning of English phrasal stress phonology in China.