A Contrastive Study Of Rhythmic Features Of Chinese Northeastern English Learners And American English Speakers In Reading-aloud Speeches

English and Chinese belong to different language families which differ greatly in pronunciation habits and prosodic characteristics.For a long time,Chinese-style English has been a great concern in foreign language teaching and learning.We often find that Chinese English learners are pretty good at pronouncing words independently,however,when it comes to discourses,few can achieve the native-like fluency and harmonious rhythm.Based on Ramus' IM model(Interval measures model)and Dellwo's method of speed normalization,Praat annotation and SPSS calculation,this paper tries to investigate the rhythmic features of Chinese Northeastern English learners compared with American native speakers.The speech materials are taken from the AESOP---CASS(Asian English Speech Corpus Project---Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)corpus.The present study takes 12 English learners,3 from each representative city(Changchun,Shenyang,Harbin,Dalian),and 12 American native speakers as a reliable criterion for comparison.The present study uses reading-aloud speech materials of 7 sentences,including both short and longer sentences,and sentences of various types,like declarative sentence,interrogative sentence,imperative sentence and comparative sentence.The research questions of this paper are as follows:1.What are the rhythmic features of Chinese Northeastern English learners and American English speakers in reading-aloud speech?2.What are the significant differences in the rhythmic features between Chinese Northeastern English learners and American English speakers?Results show that the English speech produced by Chinese Northeastern English learners carry some syllable-timed rhythm characteristics.Learners' multiple-accent phenomenon as well as the wrong placement of word stress are also problems in their acquisition of English rhythm.What's more,the improper use and over use of pauses are commonly found among learners.Lastly,the speech rate of learners is much lowerthan the native speakers'.Their English fluency is not as high as the natives' and they haven't grasped the pronunciation rules in the language flow.Learners' sense of rhythm is weaker than native speakers'.And the syllable-timed rhythm characteristics may be derived from their Chinese mother tongue.This paper tries to lay some research foundation for later studies on English learners' in Chinese Northeastern area and the prosodic acquisition research in second language acquisition for Chinese dialect areas.The result of the study may be helpful in improving the efficiency of English teaching and learning in Northeastern dialectal area.