An Empirical Study Of The Acquisition Of English Diphthongs By Chinese English Majors

The thesis reports an experimental study of the production and perception of English diphthongs by Chinese English majors.It was designed to evaluate predictions made by various models of L1 transfer in second language acquisition as well as to explore to what extent Chinese English majors can acquire English diphthongs.Specifically,this thesis explores the following questions:1.What are the differences of the acoustic features of English diphthongs produced by native speakers and Chinese English majors?2.How do Chinese English majors perceive the eight English diphthongs?3.And what is the relationship between Chinese English majors' perception and production of English diphthongs?The participants were 40 Chinese English majors from Hunan University,and their production of the eight RP diphthongs in the context of /hv/ was recorded.Then three acoustic features,i.e.F1 and F2 in the starting and end point,durational pattern of the onset,transition,and offset steady state,and rate of change of F2 of the transitional part were analyzed and compared with those of RP speakers.In addition,the same participants also participated in the percept ion experiment,and they were asked to listen to 80 tokens and then to choose what they heard.Their accuracy rate of the each diphthong was then calculated.The major findings were as follows:1.Chinese English Majors' overall production of the eight diphthongs was not satisfying,especially the four dissimilar diphthongs,i.e./ ??/,/??/,/??/ and /e?/,which is consistent with the prediction made by Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis(Lado,1957).2.The similar diphthongs /e?/,/a?/,and /??/(except /a?/)posed great difficulty to Chinese English majors in the perception experiment,which was consistent with the prediction made by the third hypothesis of Flege's Speech Learning Model(Flege,1987,1993,1999)that the greater the perceived phonetic dissimilarity between an L2 sound and L1 sound,the more likely it is that phonetic differences between the two sounds will be discerned.3.Chinese English majors showed a different pattern of the relationship between perception and production for similar and dissimilar diphthongs in these two languages.For similar diphthongs,Chinese English majors can better produce than perceive them,showing that their production is better than perception.On the other hand,for dissimilar diphthongs,Chinese English majors can better perceive the differences,while their production of these diphthongs was not satisfying,suggesting that their perception is better than production.Theoretically,the results of the production experiment wa s consistent with the prediction made by CAH,i.e.second language learners can better produce similar diphthongs than dissimilar ones;while the result of the perception experiment was in line with the third hypothesis made by SLM,that is,second language learners can better perceive dissimilar than similar diphthongs.These two experiments supported different theories,suggesting that first language's influence on learners' second language acquisition is rather complicated,and more research are needed to further clarify this question.