The Production Of English Statement Intonation By Chinese Primary Students:an Acoustic Experimental Study

Intonation refers to the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice during speech(Cruttenden,1997).It is a suprasegmental feature and plays a significant role in both language learning and language teaching.This field has been studied a lot,and most of the studies focused on the importance of stress and suprasegmental system,however,few of them focused on the acquisition of L2 English statement intonation(hereafter ESI)produced by Chinese primary students.Based on the Three Ts theory(Halliday,1976;Wells,2006)and a comparative research design,this study aims to address the following research questions:1)What are the correcr production rates of ESI produced by Chinese primary students?2)What are the typical errors of ESI produced by Chinese primary students?3)To what extent does gender affect Chinese primary students' production of ESI?4)To what extent does Chinese primary students' English proficiency correlate with their ESI production?The material of the experiment contains sixteen English statements,which are divided into five types according to the sentence structure,such as basic statements,statements with adverbial phrase,statements in the form of compound sentences,statements with subordinate phrase and statements with enumerating items.The subjects of the present study consist of two groups,mainly four RP speakers and thirty Chinese primary students.The recordings were collected by Cool Edit 2.1 in a sound-proof booth in the phonetics labs in the University of Cambridge and Yangzhou University respectively.The sound files collected from the experiment were then manually annotated via Praat 5130 and statistically analyzed via Microsoft Excel.The results of the data analysis are as follows:The correct production rates(hearafter CPRs)of ESI produced by Chinese primary students are measured from four aspects:tonality,tonicity,tone and structure of IP.For tonality,Chinese primary students divide the sentence into one or two IPs which share high consistency with RP speakers.For tonicity,Chinese primary students placed the nuclear accent on the last content words,especially,verbs,nouns and adjectives,which the same as the tonicity patterns of RP speakers.For tone,Chinese primary students apply a falling tone(H*+L)for the nuclei with 0%boundary tone.Most of them have low consistency with RP speakers and the correct production rate is very low.For the intonation structure,Chinese primary students tend to let verbs bear the head to emphasize information and fail to produce correct structure of intonation.Typical errors of ESI produced by Chinese primary students are also measured from tonality,tonicity,tone and structure of IP.In tonality,RP speakers divide the sentence according to the syntactic structure while Chinese primary students do the sentence chunking more based on the number of syllables the statements have.In tonicity,RP speakers usually accent the last content words which convey new information,mostly on verbs and nouns.In contrast,Chinese primary students place nuclear accents on personal pronouns,conjunctions,negative auxiliary word.In tone,RP speakers use a rising tone(L*+H)when the nucleus follows negative words or in the first IP of the statement with enumerating items.What's more,the head mostly bears H*or H*+L.However,Chinese primary students still apply a upgrade or downgrade falling tone(^H*+L or !H*+L)to the nucleus and the head mostly bears L+H*.In intonation structure of IP,some primary students prefer the head on function words.Moreover,in statements with subordinate phrase and statement with enumerating items,RP speakers don't let the verbs in each phrases bear the head,whereas,primary students always let verbs be the head.The effect of gender on Chinese primary students' ESI:According to statistics,we can draw a conclusion that gender affects Chinese primary students' production of ESI just in tonicity and tone but not in tonality and intonation structure.Correlation of Chinese primary students' ESI with English proficiency:According to statistics,Chinese primary students' correct production rate of ESI significantly correlates with their English proficiency.The results of the present study provide implications for the understanding of Chinese L2 English phonology and L2 phonetics teaching in primary level.Theoretically speaking,it is revealed that young L2 English learners are somewhat able to acquire the tonality of statements but difficult to produce tonicity,tone and intonation structure of IP correct,indicating the initial stage feature of Chinese L2 ESI patterns.Pedagogically speaking,Primary English teachers should pay more attention to intonation patterns of English statements and try to study tonality,tonicity,tone and intonation structure of IP of five types of statements so as to help primary students be exposed to more authentic ESI input and train them how to perceive and produce ESI correctly and fluently.No doubt,explicit ESI teaching and training is required to enhance primary students to acquire L2 English Intonation system,which is sadly ignored in Chinese English learning contexts.