A Contrastive Study On Stress Production In Oral Passage Reading By Harbin English Learners And Native English Speakers

Every language has its own segmental and suprasegmental features Suprasegmental features refer to those phonetic features that accompany or are added over consonants and vowels,such as stress,rhythm,tone and intonation.Stress is one of the most prominent prosodic features.English is a stress-timed language,which includes stressed syllables and unstressed syllables.Stressed syllables occur regularly in sentences,and the interval between two stressed syllables is roughly equal.However,Chinese is a tone language,namely,a syllable-timed language.Pitch information can signal changes in word meaning,and each syllable has the same length.Differences between English and Chinese make English learners whose first language is Chinese not sensitive to the distribution of stress.When reading English,especially English passages,they cannot produce stress correctlyThe research is based on Language Transfer,Information Structure and Stress Typology Model.Reading materials of native speakers and Harbin learners are compared from the following four aspects:the total number of stress,stress intervals,the realization of stress(pitch,duration,intensity),and stress positions.The study aims to investigate differences in terms of stress production between Harbin English learners and native speakers,and explain the reasons for stress deviations of Harbin English learners,which might be helpful to improve Harbin learners' stress acquisition and oral teaching in the futureA passage with 113 words in total,whose title is The North Wind and the sun,is selected as the research material from the AESOP-C.ASS(Asian English Speech C.orpus Project-Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)corpus.Research subjects include 10 Harbin English learners and 10 native speakers.Recordings are labeled by the Praat,and there are four tiers:word tier,Phone tier,break index tier and prominence tier.Excel is used to compile statistics and calculate the data that have been extracted by scripts Meanwhile,SPSS 21 is applied to examine whether there are significant differences between the two groups.Two research questions are explored in this study.First,what are the differences of stress production between Harbin English learners and native English speakers?Second,what are the reasons for the stress deviations of Harbin English learners?Results are as followsAs to the total number of stress,Harbin learners mostly produce more stresses than native speakers;the average number of the former is 34.7,while that of the latter is 20.9 Besides,statistically significant differences exist in the two groups.There are mainly two reasons for multiple stresses.Firstly,learners pause more times than native speakers when reading the passage so that more prosodic units are created,therefore,the total number of stress is increased.Secondly,affected by features of the syllable-timed Chinese and Northeastern dialect,learners tend to stress every wordStress intervals of Harbin learners are not well-distributed,while stresses produced by native speakers occur at roughly equal intervals,meaning that Harbin learners distribute stresses randomly when reading the passage aloud,and they are uninformed of features of stress-timed language.Their production results from shortage of stress pronunciation knowledge.In addition,a new word that learners don't know its pronunciation,a stutter,and a slip of the tongue can also lead to a longer intervalIn the way of using three acoustic parameters to realize stress,Harbin learners are significantly different from native speakers.The average pitch(measured by fundamental frequency)produced by learners is higher than that of native speakers;moreover,the pitch distinction between stressed syllables and unstressed syllables of learners are not evident,reflecting that they cannot use pitch to distinguish stressed syllables and unstressed syllables.Learners' duration of stressed syllables is longer than native speakers in average;on the one hand,they stress too many words,and on the other hand,they increase the vowel duration of function words that shouldn't be stressed,but their duration in a notional word which should be stressed is significantly shorter than native speakers,that is to say,they cannot correctly use increased duration to make stressed syllables prominent.The range of intensity as well as its average value produced by learners are bigger than those of native speakers,but no significant differences are found between the two groups.Learners' production of intensity is similar to pitch,namely,there is no distinct difference between stressed and unstressed syllables.Reasons include the influence of learners' first language and dialect,and their unawareness of the role that the three acoustic parameters play in the realization of stress.Marked differences between the two groups also exist in stress positions.As for word stress,It's a universal phenomenon for Harbin learners to displace word stress,especially in polysyllabic words.This phenomenon result from the influence of Chinese"light-heavy" Pinyin mode and its pronunciation.In terms of sentence stress,Harbin learners usually stress function words,such as prepositions and conjunctions;they place stress on the last word of a sentence to indicate termination;and they cannot distinguish given and new information.They have different segmentation of intonation groups from native speakers.For example,they regard the link word "that" as an independent component,or integrate It with the previous verb.Reasons for learners' deviations are as follows.Negative LI transfer has an effect on their stress production,and so do the different stress patterns between English and Chinese;learners lack stress knowledge about reading skills and information structureIn conclusion,there are major differences between Harbin English learners and native English speakers in terms of stress production.The main reason is negative transfer caused by learners' mother tongue and dialect.Learners'shortage of relevant knowledge about stress is another important factor.Therefore,teachers should teach more stress knowledge and reading skills in oral class,helping students understand the stress differences between English and Chinese.Students should be exposed to authentic pronunciation materials,and more imitation and practice are necessary for them to improve their stress productionThe results mentioned above can provide reference for studies that are related to stress acquisition of Harbin English learners,and useful suggestions for oral English teaching can be made.