Phonetic Perception And Production Of English Function Words In Connected Speech By Chinese Efl Learners: An Experimental Study

Function words are the words that have little lexical meaning themselves or have ambiguous meaning, but serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus, they serve as important elements to the structures of sentences(Klammer, Thomas, Schulz & Volpe, 2009). Based on the research of Roach(1991),function words take up 65% of the whole body of English discourses and they have unique phonological properties from content words(Roach, 1991). Therefore they play an important role in both written and oral communication. However, Chinese EFL learners are quite often unaware of their phonetic realizations, i.e., their strong and weak forms in different contexts, especially their weak form in connect speech. As a result, they are unable to comprehend the input correctly or speak English naturally and fluently. This reality in China cries for some research to explore Chinese EFL learners' phonetic acquisition of function words.This thesis reports an experimental study of the phonetic realization of English function words, perceptively and productively, in connected speech by Chinese learners of English as a foreign language(CEFLLs) in contrast to that of English as Received Pronunciation produced by native speakers(RPs).The study consists of two experiments. One is perceptive in nature and the other is productive. It intends to find answers to the following research questions:1. To what extent can Chinese EFL learners perceive correctly the strong and weak forms of English function words in connected speech?2. To what extent can Chinese EFL learners produce correctly the strong and weak forms of English function words in connected speech?3. Do Chinese EFL learners' perception and production of English function words correlate with each other?4. Do Chinese EFL learners' perception and production of English function words correlate with their English proficiency?So in order to make the experiments conduct perfectly and smoothly, there were 42 highly frequently used function words as the treatment of the experiments chosen from Phonology and phonetics of English written by Roach(1991). And they consist of 11 pronouns, 5 prepositions, 5 conjunctions, 3 articles, 2 determiners, and 16 auxiliary verbs. They were all embedded in 42 individual carrier sentences and a small dialogue so as to test their phonetic realizations in connected speech. The subjects of the experiments were 30 postgraduate sophomores majoring in English, while the subjects of RP English were 4 standard native speakers of RP English. The experimental data were collected in the phonetics laboratory in Jiangsu University of Science and Technology and the University of Cambridge, UK respectively. The data were collected by the software Cool Edit 4.0 and analyzed via Praat 5400, SPSS and Excel.The results of data analysis are as follows:1) The overall perception of the weak forms of function words is 46.90% which is not desirable. The best perceived catogory is the articles of which the average correct rate reaches 66.67% whereas the worst perceived catogory is auxiliary verbs of which the average correct rate is 40.00%. Among the 42 target function words, only six target words(i.e., of, a, an, the, do, we) were perceived well in weak forms with the correct perception rate over 60%.2) The overall correct production rate of the 42 target function words is 9.52%, which is really disappointed. The best produced category is the articles of which the average correct rate reaches 4.14% whereas the worst perceived catogory is auxiliary verbs and determiners, which none of them are produced correctly in weak form. Among the 42 target function words, only 4 target words(i.e., you, to, a, an,the) were produced well in weak form.3) Pearson correlation analysis reveals that there's significant positive correlation between the subjects' phonetic perception and production of function words(r=0.329, Sig.=.024). It means the subjects' perceive competence of function words in connected speech facilitates their productive performance of function words in connected speech, or vise versa.4) Pearson correlation analysis also reveals that the subjects' phonetic competence,perceptively and productively, correlates significantly with their overall English proficiency(r= 0.311, Sig.=.012). This demonstrates that phonetic competence is one of the pivital essentials that triggers the growth of overall English proficiency.The higher phonetic competence, the higher overall English proficiency.The findings of the present study provide a new look into the phonetic acquisition of L2 English phonological rules, and some pedagogical implications for the learning and teaching of L2 English phonetics in China.