A Study On The Intonational Features Of Statements By English Learners In Northeastern China

Taking Halliday's “Three Ts” theory and the Auto-segmental Metrical theory as the theoretical foundations,this thesis tries to explore the intonational features of statements produced by Northeastern English learners through acoustic experiment.The research is designed to answer the following questions:(1)What are the intonational features of Northeastern English learners in terms of phrase segmentation?(2)What are the intonational features of Northeastern English learners in terms of prominence distribution?(3)What are the intonational features of Northeastern English learners in terms of tonal pattern?The research materials of this thesis are from the corpus named as the AESOP-CASS(Asian English Speech Corpus Project-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).And this research combines ToBI and IViE labeling systems to annotate the research data,and then normalizes the extracted data to ensure the accuracy of the research.The main findings are as follows: the features of phrase segmentation:(1)Northeastern English learners prefer using pause as the most important acoustic cue to achieve phrase segmentation,and there are more intermediate phrases in their speech.(2)The intonational phrases of Northeastern English learners are much shorter than those of native speakers and learners usually take the first content word or even individual article in a sentence as an IP.The features of prominence distribution:(1)No matter what focus type the sentences are,the prominent words or syllables of Northeastern English learners are obviously more than those of native speakers.They may take prepositions or articles as prominent points.(2)When focus is placed at the front of the sentence,the syllabic number has little influence on the accent distribution of the whole sentence,whereas,if focus is placed at the middle or final part of the sentence,the fluctuation of disyllabic word is greater than that of tri-syllabic word.(3)When focus is placed at the end of the sentence,Northeastern English learners may ignore the word stress of focus and blindly use the sentence-final falling tone.(4)When the sentence is under broad focus,native speakers will obey the “Tonicity's Conditions” theory to highlight the final content word,while Northeastern English learners may highlight the final word regardless of the placement of focus.(5)There are significant differences of prominence distribution between native speakers and Northeastern English learners.And the correlations between prominence distribution and content words of these two groups are high and the correlations with grammatical words are low,whereas,the correlation between prominent distribution and grammatical words of Northeastern English learners is obviously higher than that of native speakers;The features of tonal pattern:(1)Northeastern English learners prefer using H*L,on the contrary,native speakers prefer using L*H to highlight the non-final focus.As regards the sentence-final focus,native speakers may choose L* or H*L while the language learners still use H*L.(2)As for the boundary tone of intermediate phrases,Northeastern English learners always choose %H-L% while native speakers always choose %L-H% to mark the intermediate phrases.(3)And as for the boundary tone of the whole sentence,even though all of them choose the falling tone to close statements,the falling range of native speakers is more obvious and sharp than that of Northeastern English learners.And the falling range of Northeastern English learners is relatively flat so that the front boundary almost holds in line with the final boundary.Due to the limitations of research data and the author's abilities,the findings of this research may need a further verification.Besides,in order to explore the intonational features of language learners more detailedly,the short essays or dialogues are suggested as research materials in future studies.