An Experimental Study Of English Rising Tone Produced By Mandarin EFL Learners

Intonation is one of the major supra-segmental prosodic features for all languages and its role and importance can never be overlooked in real-life communication.English rising tones,as the basic intonation pattern in English,have been one of the difficult aspects for Mandarin EFL learners to acquire accurately because its realization varies according to their phonetic contexts.This thesis reports an experimental acoustic study of English rising tones produced by Mandarin EFL learners,which intends to address the following questions:1)To what extent do Mandarin EFL learners produce English rising tones correctly?2)What are the acoustic features of English rising tones produced by Mandarin EFL learners?3)What are the typical errors of English rising tones produced by Mandarin EFL learners?The subjects of the present study were 30 Mandarin EFL learners,who were required to read English rising tones in five different phonetic contexts,and 4 English phoneticians,whose production of the treatment material was used as the standard intonation patterns.The experimental materials consisted of 8 simple words,4 short sentences,8 sentences with 8 types of tone-unit structures,7 sentences with different tail structures and 9 sentences with four types of sentence-types.The production of target rising tones by Mandarin EFL learners were recorded in the phonetics lab at Jiangsu University of Science and Technology and that by English phoneticians was collected at the Phonetic Lab of the University of Cambridge.The recorded data were annotated and calculated acoustically via Praat 5400 and then analyzed statistically via Excel and SPSS 21.0 to generate the answers to the research questions.The findings of the data analyses are as follows.The overall correct production rate(CPR)of English rising tones is 74.39%.The categorical CPRs of English rising tones in simple words,in short sentences,in sentences with tone-unit structures,in sentences with different tail structures,in sentences with different sentence-types are 90.42%,86.67%,71.67%,72.38% and 61.52% respectively.These findings reveal that firstly,among five phonetic contexts,simple word context is the most produced phonetic context and four sentence-types context is the least;secondly,the increasing syllable number in carrier words contributes to lower CPRs in simple words and short sentences;thirdly,in sentences with tone-unit structures,CPRs of tone-units without tails are larger than those of tone-units with tails and the increasing numbers of tails bring about lower CPRs of rising tones in sentences with tail structures;lastly,different sentence-types and placement of nucleus greatly affect CPRs of rising tones.Acoustically speaking,few Mandarin EFL learner subjects were capable to correctly produce the pitch,duration and intensity of English rising tones as well as RP speakers.Specifically,one sample t-test results confirm that there are significant differences in pitch ranges,durations and intensity of target English rising tones in five different phonetic contexts between EFL learners and RP speakers in most cases because of the negative transfer of L1 rhythmic pattern.The typical erroneous patterns of rising tones produced by Mandarin EFL learners are: 37.89% are that rising tones are wrongly produced as high rise.27.31% are produced as rising-falling tones or rising-falling-rising tones.12.96% are produced as falling tones.Besides,there are other small errors,like the wrong placement of tonic syllable,misuse of pause,mild tone patterns and so on.The pedagogical implications of this study are as follows: firstly,mandarin EFL learners need to be taught and trained to improve their productions of English rising tones in complex phonetic contexts;secondly,in terms of acoustical features,mandarin EFL learners should systematically learn from RP speakers and try to imitate and approximate to those by RP speakers;thirdly,strenuous efforts must be made to correct the wrongly produced English rising tones.The findings in this study offer a new understanding of the English rising tones produced by Mandarin EFL learners,their acoustic features as well as the erroneous patterns in different contexts.No doubt,the findings of the present study provide empirical reference to the study of Mandarin L2 learners' English intonation and practical suggestions for English intonation instruction in China.