| In speech communication,prosody can not only transmit linguistic information,but also a lot of paralinguistic or non-linguistic information,that is,the speaker’s attitudes.Ohala puts forward Frequency Code,which points out there is universal meaning of prosody between different languages.Based on this,a number of scholars have conducted research of cross-language attitudinal prosody.By comparing the perception of subjects from different language backgrounds,studies show that both universal and languagespecific components influence the perception on attitudinal prosody.However,there still lacks of studies on Chinese EFL learners’ perception on English attitudinal prosody.Based on this,taking native English listeners as a reference group,this research aims to explore Chinese EFL learners’ perception on warmth in English and try to explain the reasons for the differences in perception.Specifically,two research questions are covered in this study:(1)What are the unique prosodic features of native English speakers’ utterances conveying warm attitude in terms of pitch,intensity and duration?(2)What are the similarities and differences of perception on warmth in English between native English listeners and Chinese EFL learners? In this study,124 target sentences produced by native English speakers expressing warm/cold(not warm)greetings and welcome were recorded,and 10 native English listeners and 20 Chinese EFL learners participated the perceptual experiment to rate the warmth of the target sentences using a 1-7 semantic difference scale(1 for very cold,7 for very warm).The results showed that:(1)native English speakers express warmth by increasing pitch register and widening pitch span,while no significant correlation with the intensity and duration was found.(2)Chinese EFL learners could distinguish between warmth and coldness as same as native English listeners,which supports the Frequency Code.(3)Compared with native English listeners,Chinese EFL learners’ perception on warmth/coldness is significantly different.When rating the warmth,the ratings of native English listeners are obviously higher than that of Chinese EFL learners.And in terms of coldness,the ratings of former are lower that of latter.Through the analysis,it indicates that Chinese EFL learners’ native language is the main reason for affecting perception.Firstly,with restriction of fixed tone on each word,pitch variation in Chinese is much less flexible than that of English,therefor the perception of Chinese EFL learners on warmth which are mainly conveyed by using pitch in English is relatively poor.Secondly,as less use of short-term changes in F0 to express attitudes in tone languages(in which short-term F0 contours are used to carry lexical information)than in Indo-European languages(in which F0 plays no lexical role),listeners of a tonal language are generally worse at recognizing attitudinal prosody than listeners of a non-tonal language.Thirdly,besides using prosody,Chinese natives use repetition to express warm attitude,which does not exist in English.Based on the research findings,Chinese EFL learners have a poor perception on attitudinal prosody in English.Therefore,more attention should be focused to the attitudinal prosody of English in phonetic teaching,so as to provide a reference for the second language phonetic teaching. |
