Effects Of Musical Training On Chinese Learners' Perception Of English Suprasegmentals

Chinese learners have typical Chinglish pronunciation,which,as far as suprasegmentals are concerned,is reflected in the failure to learn the prosodic features in English speech.The failure has two potential sources: inaccurate perception and incorrect imitation.Owing to the fact that perception is the basis for production and as far as rhythm and intonation are concerned,this research investigates four groups of participants: musicianship 2* English proficiency 2 in terms of their abilities of pitch and duration perception in order to examine whether musical training,English proficiency and gender will affect those abilities within the framework of language transfer,OPERA Hypothesis,Resource Sharing Framework and Neural Plasticity.Results show that musical training will enhance abilities of pitch perception and duration perception in suprasegmentals of English speech for Chinese EFL learners.Learners with higher English proficiency are more adept at perceiving pitch and duration in suprasegmentals of English speech.However,gender does not significantly affect the perceptive abilities of either pitch or duration in suprasegmentals of English speech.In addition,for Chinese EFL Learners of low proficiency,the more musical training they receive,the better results at perceiving pitch and duration in English will be.While for Chinese learners of high proficiency,there is no such correlation.