Effects Of Language Background And Gender On Phonetic Convergence

Phonetic acquisition is an indispensable part of second language acquisition,but also one of the difficulties.In different phonetic environments,interlocutors will adjust their original speech habits or styles to be closer to the speech or style of the speaker,thus producing the phenomenon of phonetic convergence.The studies on phonetic convergence focuses much more on the contexts of reading and imitation,while the spontaneous speech is less noticed.This paper takes the phonetic production of Chinese EFL learners as background and examines the phonetic convergence during spontaneous speech,especially the effects of language background and gender.Based on the Braj Kachru"s model of World Englishes,speakers from three different backgrounds were selected,a native speaker of American English,a native speaker of both English and Hindi,and also a Chinese native speaker,who is proficient in English.They were asked to communicate with 26 Chinese EFL learners of English in a map task,which was designed to elicit a natural-like spontaneous speech.In this experiment,eleven target words were designed:had,hat,head,heat,heating,heed,heeding,hod,hot,hood,hoodie.Five vowels were included in these words,i.e./ae/,/a/,/i:/,/u/,/e/.All of them were embedded in a hVd/hVt context.The study used the method of experimental phonetics to compare the phonetic features of vowels,including fundamental frequency(known as f0)and formant.What"s more,the distance between interlocutors was measured by calculating the Euclidean distance(ED)and interlocutor similarity(IS).The results show that the language backgrounds do have effect on Chinese EFL learners' production in both f0 and formant.This paper also finds that the participants increase their f0 greatly when talking with Indian speakers.Though previous studies about the effect of gender on phonetic convergence varies from paper to paper,in this paper,the gender do have effects on the production of vowel,and it is found that female speakers show a more obvious tendency of convergence than male speakers,which is consistent with Pardo"s study both in 2006 and 2014.