A Study On The Intonation Features Of English Interrogative Sentences By The Chinese Efl Learners

Based on the autosegmental-metrical theory and language transfer,this study adopts the method of experimental speech analysis to compare the English intonation patterns of the Shandong EFL learners and those of the American native speakers thoroughly.The in-depth analysis and discussion about the intonation problems produced by the learners from Shandong dialectal region are given in this thesis in hope of providing reference for English phonetics teaching.All the subjects are selected from Asian English Speech Corpus Project(AESOP).Sixteen speakers from Shandong dialectal region are randomly selected as subjects with four subjects in each district(two males and two females).In order to compare the intonation features of Shandong EFL learners with those of standard English,four American native speakers are chosen for reference.The corpus of the American speakers is constructed by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the speakers speak General American English without regional accents.The experimental materials consist of twenty English interrogative sentences including six yes-no questions,six wh-questions,four alternative questions and four tag questions.The experimental materials selected are annotated with the help of the phonetics analysis software---Praat.After annotation,the corresponding script is adopted to extract the required data and the data is finally processed with the aid of the software Excel and SPSS.The experimental data is analyzed and discussed from the perspectives of accent distribution,phrase segmentation and final boundary tone respectively.Results are listed as follows: 1)In terms of accent distribution,Shandong EFL learners tend to accent much more words than American native speakers.The percentage of function words accented by EFL learners is relatively high,especially for personal pronouns;Specifically speaking,Shandong learners always assign an accent to the wh-word in the wh-question while the wh-word does not normally bear the most prominent accent in American speakers’ production;In tag questions,learners tend to accent the pronoun at the sentence-final,whereas American speakers always give prominence to the auxiliary verb.2)In respect of phrase segmentation,EFL learners tend to use frequent breaks and cut the sentences into more but shorter intonation units;The location of intonation breaks producedby EFL learners is of great randomness with most of phrasing patterns not consistent with syntactic or information structure;EFL learners mainly depend on pause to cut speech while American speakers employ diversified division methods to realize speech segmentation.3)With respect to final boundary tones,there exist significant differences in final boundary tones between EFL learners and native speakers in yes-no questions and tag questions,whereas no significant differences are found in the final boundary tones of wh-questions and alternative questions;EFL learners use the boundary tone patterns in chaos.The falling tone often appears at the end of yes-no questions whose default tone is a rise.Likewise,in alternative questions which belong to HL intonation pattern,the rising intonation is sometimes employed.