The Phonetic Convergence In The English Segmental Perception And Production Of Chinese EFL Learners

Second language phonological acquisition research can be divided into two aspects:speech perception and speech production.The orderly interaction between speech perception and production is an important way to achieve effective speech communication.A prominent example is phonetic convergence,the phenomenon that a speaker adjusts his/her own speech to the acoustic-phonetic characteristics in the interacting speaker’s production after perceiving the phonetic differences to promote the communication(Nguyen et al.,2013;Scarbel et al.,2017).The research on phonetic convergence abroad has achieved fruitful results both in theory and practice,but the research about convergence at home is still relatively rare.In view of this,based on the Speech Learning Model in second language phonological acquisition,combined with the Motor theory in psycholinguistics and Communication Accommodation Theory in sociolinguistics,this thesis makes an empirical study on the phenomenon of phonetic convergence in the interaction of Chinese EFL learners with different English proficiency.In this study,22 pairs of unacquainted participants were selected to make English majors match with non-English majors and English majors respectively,and all the participants were pretested to ensure that the oral English level of the selected English majors was higher than that of non-English majors,and there was no significant difference between the English majors,no significant difference between the non-English majors in oral English proficiency.Meanwhile,the high frequency words with CVC structure,which are composed of the front vowels and stops that are rather representative in English segments,were selected as the experimental materials.E-Prime software was used to design an interactive experiment with two screens,including four parts: Pre-naming task,Elicitation passage,Matching task and Post-naming task.Combining with questionnaires and interview,the self-evaluation and psychological tendency of the participants were explored.Praat speech analysis software and SPSS software were used for data analysis and processing.The study attempted to examine the following three questions from the perspectives of speech perception and speech production.(1)Does phonetic convergence happen in the interaction between Chinese EFL learnersacross English phonological proficiency levels on the segmental level?(2)If phonetic convergence happens,what is the degree and pattern of convergence between different EFL learners?(3)What are the factors that affect the phonetic convergence between English learners in foreign language acquisition?Results showed that both English majors and non-English majors had phonetic convergence in the perception and production of English segmental features.On the perceptual level,all the participants in both EM-EM group and EM-NM group had increasing word identification accuracy and decreasing response time across blocks,indicating that the participants were closer to each other in speech perception and convergence occurs.At the level of production,it was found that both English majors and non-English majors made use of temporal cues and spectral cues to distinguish vowels and showed apparent convergence tendency in vowel duration and vowel formants.In terms of vowel duration,the convergence between the participants was mainly performed by the consistent change direction of vowel duration.In terms of vowel formants,it was found through the analysis of acoustic vowel charts,spectral differences of participants and the Euclidean distances of vowels before and after the tasks that all the paired speakers in EM-NM group and EM-EM group represented the convergence to each other in speech production.An exception was that English majors diverged to non-English majors in the advancement feature of vowel /i:/ significantly and diverged to non-English majors in the property of lowness of vowel /?/ slightly.As far as the degree of convergence is concerned,the EM-NM group possessed significantly higher degree of phonetic convergence than that of EM-EM group.On the speech perception,significant improvement of word identification accuracy in later blocks of EM-NM group was found,while the identification accuracy in EM-EM group only slightly increased,which indicated a higher degree of phonetic convergence between English majors and non-English majors.On the speech production,although all the paired speakers in EM-NM group and EM-EM group showed the convergence to each other,the non-English majors converged significantly to the English majors.Significant differences on the height of the tongue positions of vowel /?/ and /?/ were discovered between the English majors and non-English majors in the EM-NM group before the tasks.But after the tasks,there was nosignificant differences between them.In addition,it can be seen from the spectrum that the non-English major participants automatically adjusted part of their pronunciation through the convergence to English majors,leading to more similar manner of articulation with English major participants.In general,the EM-NM group had a higher degree of phonetic convergence.In terms of the pattern of convergence,the phonetic convergence of English learners at the level of English segments was mainly manifested in the relatively consistent change direction of duration,and the converged formant frequencies and the articulation gestures after interaction.Combined with the questionnaires and interviews,the study found that the factors influencing EFL learners’ phonetic convergence at the English level include the learners’ English phonological proficiency,their attitude towards the identity of the speaker and the self-confidence for their own English phonological level.The EFL learners with lower English phonological proficiency converge to the learners with higher phonological proficiency.The English learners with similar English phonological levels also tend to converge to each other,but the degree of convergence is relatively low.The direction and degree of English learners’ speech adjustment are positively correlated with their implicit attitude towards the identity of each other,and negatively correlated with the learners’ evaluation of their own English phonological proficiency.The research adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the phonetic convergence between Chinese EFL learners in the perception and production at the segmental level,which provides a new perspective for the study of second language phonological acquisition,and also has some implications for the phonetic teaching.