A Contrastive Study On The Focus Realization Of Statements By Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners And Native English Speakers

As an important prosodic feature of English intonation,focus often carries the central information of the utterance,and the quality of its realization directly affects the realization of the communicative purpose.However,due to the language differences between English and Chinese,the defects of traditional teaching methods,and the influence of dialects,Chinese EFL learners’ prosody acquisition has been restricted,and their prosodic realization of focus is inevitably affected.However,researches at home concerning the focus acquisition by EFL learners under the background of Chinese dialects are quite rare.Based on the Auto-segmental Metrical theory,the present study selects 15 statements produced by 12 Chinese Northeastern EFL learners and 6 standard American native speakers,half male and half female,under the situations of broad focus and narrow focus from the AESOP-CASS corpus as research materials,with sentences of narrow focus divided into three types: focus in sentence-initial,focus in sentence-medial and focus in sentence-final.Then,the annotating software Praat,the annotation system To BI which is appropriately adjusted according to the research purposes,and some related scripts are employed in the process of data annotation and extraction.After that,Excel and SPSS were applied in data statistics,normalization and analysis.The present study attempts to explore the features of focus realization by Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners and native English speakers in different contexts and the differences between the two groups in focus realization from five perspectives:nucleus placement,nuclear tone types,pitch,duration and intensity which are visual acoustic parameters,and tries to make appropriate explanations for the reasons behind the differences.The present study aims to address the following three questions:1)What are the features of focus realization of statements by native English speakers? 2)What are the features of focus realization of statements by Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners? 3)What are the differences and possible reasons for the differences of focus realization of statements between native English speakers and Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners?The results of the acoustic experiment are as follows:The features of Native English speakers’ focus realization: 1)In the aspect of nucleus placement,most native speakers can place the nucleus on and only on the word stress of the final lexical word or that of the focused word and extremely few of them produce more nucleuses in a sentence.2)In the aspect of nuclear tone types,“!H*” and “H*” are used more widely.3)In the aspect of pitch,an apparent elevation of pitch and an obvious expansion of pitch range are found at the position of the on-focus syllables,and the overall pitch change basically accords with PFC phenomenon and PENTA model.4)In the aspect of duration,an obvious syllable lengthening usually occurs at the position of the on-focus syllables.5)In the aspect of intensity,an apparent enhancement of intensity usually appears at the position of the on-focus syllables.The features of Chinese Northeastern EFL learners’ focus realization: 1)In terms of nucleus placement,most Chinese Northeast English learners can place the nucleus on and only on the default positions,too.A small number of them will achieve more nucleuses in a sentence,or misplace the nucleus due to their pronunciation errors of word stress.2)In terms of nuclear tone types,“!H*” and “H*” are also used more often than the other types.3)In terms of pitch,the pitch rises and the pitch range expands to some degree at the position of the on-focus syllables,too.But the overall pitch change is quite different from PFC phenomenon and PENTA model.4)In terms of duration,the duration of the on-focus syllables always gets lengthened to some extent,too.5)In terms of intensity,the intensity of the on-focus syllables always gets enhanced to some degree,too.The differences of focus realization between the two groups may be summarized as follows: 1)With regard to nucleus placement,the percentage of Chinese Northeastern EFL learners who place the nucleus on and only on the default positions is always lower than that of native English speakers and the difference between the two groups is statistically significant under broad focus situation.2)With regard to nuclear tone types,both Chinese Northeastern EFL learners and native English speakers tend to use “!H*” and “H*” to realize prosodic focusing and there is no statistically significant difference between the two groups.3)With regard to pitch performances,the pitch of the on-focus syllables produced by Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners is higher in all contexts and significantly higher in most contexts than that produced by Native English speakers.Besides,the overall pitch change of native English speakers suggests that they tend to use PFC means and PENTA model to make the focus more prominent,while the overall pitch change of Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners shows no obvious patterns that resemble PFC means and PENTA model.4)With regard to duration performances,the duration is always longer and the increment of duration is always larger produced by native English speakers at the position of the on-focus syllables than those produced by Chinese Northeastern EFL learners.5)With regard to intensity performances,the intensity and increment of intensity produced by native English speakers at the position of the on-focus syllables are always stronger and larger respectively than those produced by Chinese Northeastern EFL learners,and the difference in intensity between the two groups is proved to be statistically significant under medial focus situation.The differences in focus realization between Chinese Northeastern EFL learners and native English speakers may be the result of negative transfer of the Northeast dialect and Mandarin Chinese.Firstly,there is no word stress in Mandarin Chinese and the Northeast dialect.Therefore,the macro freedom and micro fixity of English word stress undoubtedly make it more difficult for Chinese Northeastern EFL learners to produce word stress,thus leading to the misplacement of nucleus.Secondly,the differences of Mandarin Chinese and the Northeast dialect from English in sentence stress lead to that it sounds like that they are reading isolated English words when Chinese Northeastern EFL learners read English sentences,thus causing the occurrence of more nucleuses in their spoken English.Thirdly,Mandarin Chinese and the Northeast dialect are tone languages,and the Northeast dialect sounds flat and lacks rise and fall because of its lower tone pitch and narrower tone range,which leads to that Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners may be not good at expressing focus through pitch change.Finally,the stressed-time language feature and the staccato characteristics of Mandarin Chinese and the Northeast dialect make Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners show some differences from native speakers in the use of duration and intensity to mark the focus.The above findings provide some empirical evidence for prosodic studies of Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners and domestic English teaching and learning.However,due to the limited resources and time,the present study still needs further verification and perfection.It is suggested that more comprehensive,in-depth and detailed researches on the features of focus realization of Chinese EFL learners in dialectal areas should be carried out in the future,so that more useful implications could be given to English teaching and learning in China.