A Contrastive Study Of Rhythmic Features Of Harbin English Learners And Native English Speakers In Oral Reading

English belongs to Indo-European Language Family,while Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan Language Family,which means these two languages have different segmental and suprasegmental features.This fact leads to great difficulty for Chinese English learners to acquire English pronunciation.In recent years,Chinese scholars have conducted some researches on segmental features of Chinese English learners,but researches on suprasegmental characteristics,especially on rhythmic features are not as much as segmental ones.In this paper,the author chooses Harbin English learners as the subjects and American native English speakers as the references and by comparison,it tries to find the similarities and differences of rhythmic features between the two groups.This paper uses Halliday's Three T's Theory to explore the differences of tonality and tonicity patterns of Harbin English learners and native English speakers.It also adopts Interval Measure(IM for short)proposed by Ramus et al.and Varco V,Varco C brought up by Dellwo to get the vocalic and consonantal duration variation in the whole passage.Pairwise Variability Index(PVI for short)put forward by Grabe and Low is used to explore the duration variation of neighboring intervals.The reading materials are from AESOP-CASS(Asian English Speech Corpus Project—Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)corpus.The author selects ten Harbin English learners as subjects and chooses ten American native English speakers as references.The reading materials named The North Wind and The Sun are relatively long,containing 105 words,which contributes to a more scientific result in doing rhythmic research.Two research questions are as follows:1.What are the differences of rhythmic patterns in oral reading between native English speakers and Harbin English learners?2.What are the reasons for the differences in rhythmic patterns between native English speakers and Harbin English learners?With the help of Praat and its relevant scripts,the author annotates the reading materials and extract the data.After extracting the data,the author applies SPSS to do the Independent T Test and Correlation Test.The following are the results of this study.The results of tonality pattern demonstrate two different aspects.Firstly,Harbin English learners have more intonation phrases than native speakers do.Secondly,learners and native speakers mark the boundary of intonation phrases in different ways.Native speakers usually apply four external markers to mark the boundary,including pause,the pitch reset of unstressed syllables,anacrusis and lengthening of the final syllable.But Harbin English learners tend to use pauses to set the boundary.They seldom use other markers.In this research,they never use anacrusis to mark the boundary.When it comes to the tonicity pattern,native speakers tend to stress new and important information.Learners read English with more pauses and set focuses randomly,which hinders the conveyance of information.The results show that there are some significant differences in rhythm duration patterns of the two groups.Harbin English learners have lower Varco C values than native speakers,which means that they have trouble in acquiring the complicated consonant clusters in English.Learners have lower nPVI-V values than native speakers,which shows that learners can not grasp the alternation of stressed syllables and unstressed ones in stress-timed language.Since Chinese is a syllable-timed language,Harbin English learners may produce English with some syllable-timed features.Harbin English speakers have a lower speech rate.The Correlation Test with speech rate and acoustic parameters can explain that speech rate is one of the most significant factors that can influence rhythm patterns.All in all,the different rhythm patterns of Harbin English learners and native speakers may result from the influence of their mother tongue.They speak stress-timed English with syllable-timed Chinese features,which may affect communication.The research findings above may lay foundations for later rhythm studies in Harbin area,and also provide help for the oral English teaching in this area.