An Experimental Phonetic Study On Acquisition Of English Fricative [∫] Of English Learners In Shandong Dialect Regions

The research on consonants has great significance,which has attracted the attention ofmany scholars(Conor,1967;Xiao,1994;Kong,2001;Ran,2008;Sui,2009;Wu,2010;Meng,2012).However,the number of related researches is small especially the single consonant researches.This paper aims to explore the acquisition of English fricative [∫] of Shandong English learners from perspective of experimental phonetics,based on the corpus of AESOP-CASS-SD.This study tries to describe and analyze the acoustic and physiological characteristics of [∫] spoken by English learners in Shandong four dialect regions.Further,this paper aims to simply point out the main reasons for the differences of [∫] spoken by English learners in Shandong four dialect regions in order to further provide some suggestions for the consonant teaching.This research employs the method of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,with the quantitative method as the main method.The recording data needed in the study are from the corpus of AESOP-CASS-SD,among which one hundred and thirty-six informants are selected,including one hundred and twenty-eight students from domestic sixteen cities and eight US students.More concretely,the research is done by using Minispeechlab,SPSS and Mspaint to extract and deal with the acoustic and physiological parameters,such as spectral center of gravity,degree of dispersion,manner of articulation and so on.The Chinese students are about twenty years old and it is the same with the US students.Three questions are presented in this study: i)Are there any acoustic differences of the English fricative [∫] spoken by English learners of Shandong four dialect regions? If there are,then what are the particularly different aspects? ii)Are there any physiological differences of the English fricative [∫] spoken by English learners of Shandong four dialect regions? If there are,then what are the particularly different aspects? iii)If there are differences of English fricative [∫]among Shandong regions,then what are the main reasons?The findings and results of the study are as follows: i)There are acoustic differences of the English fricative [∫] spoken by English learners in Shandong four dialect regions,mainly reflected in three aspects: spectral center of gravity,degree of dispersion and distribution range.From perspective of spectral center of gravity,the biggest is WL followed by WQ,EW,EL and US.On the contrary,for degree of dispersion,the biggest is US followed by EL,EW,WQ and WL.For distribution range,the largest is EL,followed by EW,WQ,WL and US.ii)There are physiological differences of the English fricative [∫] spoken by English learners in Shandong four dialect regions,mainly reflected in the manner of articulation.From perspective of the gap of articulation,USA is the biggest followed by EL,EW,WQ and WL.iii)The main reason for the differences is the transfer effect of corresponding Shandong dialect pronunciation of [??] to the English fricative [∫].According to the previous researches,with the change of Shandong regions from west to east,there is a pronunciation tendency that the tongue is of being front and declining.