Acoustic Measurement Of Chinese Students' English Rhythm

Speech rhythm endows languages a certain structure and the function of organization.The presence of speech rhythm improves the predictability of speech events and the comprehensibility of speech.Therefore,rhythm is the key factor in English learners' L2 phonetics acquisition.Relevant domestic studies on speech rhythm started relatively late and mostly focused on the discussion of segmental features,word stress and intonation patterns in traditional research methods,while lacking in attention on suprasegmental features and the support of quantitative acoustic data.Rhythm is also the core element of both musical aptitude and L2 phonetics acquisition.Therefore,it is necessary for the current study to pick up rhythm as a new perspective to carry out acoustic measurements of English learners' speech rhythm and to develop study and analysis of English learners' speech rhythm pattern.This current study mainly compared the English rhythm measuring parameters of English learners and native speakers,centering on the acquisition of English rhythm of English learners and trying to answer the following questions: 1)Whether there exist any significant differences of English rhythm between English learners of different musical rhythm aptitude;2)What is the correlation between musical rhythm aptitude and English rhythm.Participants of the present study included 30 non-English and non-music majors and 10 English native speakers.English learners are either undergraduate students or post graduate students and they were selected through specially designed questionnaires.After that,participants were grouped into high and low musical rhythm aptitude groups by taking MRAT(musical rhythm aptitude test).Based on the grouping result,participants are arranged to accept the acoustic measurement of their English rhythm.This study adopted the instrumental phonetics approach to collect participants' reading materials,employing phonetics processing software(Praat)to annotate and analyze the reading materials,calculating the English rhythm measuring parameters through different acoustic measuring models(the IM parameters and PVI parameters).What is more,statistical analyses and comparisons between different groups of English learners' rhythm parameters,between that of native speakers and English learners and between that of different genders were made.The analysis of musical rhythm aptitude test's result pointed out that the key elements influencing musical rhythm aptitude are musical rhythm perception and musical stress.Through the comparison and analyses of the research results,the current study found out that firstly,significant differences exist in English rhythm parameters between English learners of different musical rhythm aptitude.And the Pearson correlations coefficient of the research results pointed out that the parameters of those who scored higher in the MRAT(Group 2)are ranged closer to that of native speakers,that is to say,English learners' musical rhythm aptitude test could have a predictive function of their English rhythm measuring results in the present study.Also,female English learners have a better performance in L2 rhythm acquisition than male English learners.Secondly,further analysis of the elements of English rhythm and musical rhythm found out that stress is the crucial element to both English rhythm acquisition and musical rhythm aptitude cultivation.To sum up,the present study carried out acoustic measurement of Chinese students' English rhythm by focusing on learners with different musical rhythm aptitude and is of great theoretical and practical value for the development of spoken English teaching,the revision of spoken English scoring standards,speech recognition and the speech synthesis.Also,it provides a new research perspective for the rhythm study of Chinese learners since it is based on the analysis of learners' musical rhythm aptitude.Future studies can try to establish multi-dimensional speech rhythm measuring models which helps to achieve the quantification of English rhythm.Also,the sample size can be enlarged and therefore rhythmic corpus of English learners with different dialects and from different schools and so on can be set up.What's more,the research material of future studies may not be limited to read speech but also spontaneous speech,and the focus might be put on applying which type of musical rhythm and stress structure into English rhythm teaching and learners' rhythm acquisition.