The Influence Of Different First Language Experience On English Pronunciation Acquisition

The study adopts acoustic means to investigate the influence of the first language on English pronunciation.Up to now,studies of the influence of the first language on second language pronunciation mainly use qualitative analysis instead of experimental phonetics.In this regard,this thesis applies acoustic measures to analyze different production errors of English vowels between Mandarin students and bidialect students and to reveal positive and negative transfer of first language on the acquisition of English pronunciation.The corpora consist of two parts.The English corpus is 27 phonetic balanced words with vowels/?/?/a:/?/i/?/i:/?/u/?/u:/?/?s/?/(?)/?/(?)/?/(?):/in the middle,while the dialect corpus includes 10 Ningde dialect words with dialect vowels/a/?/i/?/u/?/?/?/(?)/after the first consonant.The following are findings:(1)In ten vowels investigated(/?/?/a:/?/i/?/i:/?/u/?/u:/?/?/s/?/(?)/?/(?)/?/(?)/?/(?):/),Mandarin informants pronounced six vowels differently from bidialect informants.Differences existed in tongue's height(such as/(?)/),in tongue's front-and-back position(such as/i:/?/?/?/a:/?/?/),and in vowels' duration(such as/u:/?/(?)/).(2)Negative transfer form dialect was mainly responsible for the divergence.Five dialect vowels(/a/?/i/?/u/?/?/?/(?)/)were transferred into similar English vowels except/i/,so bidialect informants performed worse than Mandarin informants in vowel production.(3)In nine vowels investigated(/i:/?/i/?/?/?/(?)/?/a:/?/?/?/u:/?/u/?/(?):/),informants of different gender acquired different English vowels no matter they were in Mandarin or dialect group.(4)In nine vowels investigated(/i:/?/i/?/?/?/(?)/?/a:/?/?/?/u:/?/u/?/(?):/),both genders of dialect informants produced English vowels differently from native speakers,but they showed different tendencies.Male bidialect informants tended to put their tongues further forward,while female bidialect informants tended to put their tongues lower than native speakers except the time when they pronounced/i/and/(?)/.(5)In nine vowels investigated(/i:/?/i/?/?/?/(?)/?/a:?/?/?/?/u:/?/u/?/(?):/),the problems bidialect informants produced in English vowels were mainly due to negative transfer from Mandarin and Ningde dialect vowels similar to English vowels.(6)It's not negative transfer from Mandarin that caused differences in nine vowels investigated(/i:/?/i/?/?/?/(?)/?/a:/?/?/?/u:/?/u/?/(?):/)between Mandarin and native speakers.(7)Vowels in the first language similar to those in the target language might have both negative and positive transfer on the acquisition of the target language.(8)In nine vowels investigated(/i:/?/i/?/?/?/(?)/?/a:/?/(?)/?/u:/?/u/?/(?):/),bidialect informants acquired English vowel totally by transfer,while Mandarin informants did that either by transferring the first language or by building new phonetic categories for English vowels.