| Disfluency,a natural phenomenon in speech production,is normal for both native English speakers and EFL learners to produce non-fluent sentences.More importantly,this phenomenon is not completely random and irregular.On the contrary,disfluent utterances have evident characteristics that deserve concentrating on.This thesis aims to analyze the prosody features of disfluency in EFL learners’ public speech and spontaneous speech.Based on the three aspects of prosody,including duration,pitch and intensity,this thesis investigates the prosodic features of disfluent utterances.It mainly answers the following three questions: Firstly,what is the distribution of pause,repetition and self-repair in EFL learner’s speech production?Secondly,concerning the prosodic features of disfluency,what are the differences between public speech and spontaneous speech in terms of pitch,intensity and duration?Thirdly,what are the possible reasons for EFL learners displaying different prosodic features when producing public speech and spontaneous speech?To address the above questions,this thesis focus on the 2016 "FLTRP Cup" English Public Speaking Contest(Tianjin Municipality Semi-finals),using the speech produced by 22 contestants as the corpus.What is more,acoustic analysis software PRAAT is adopted for data annotation and analysis.The thesis shows that: speech rate is relatively fast when EFL learners produce spontaneous speech,while they tend to have a slower speech rate in public speech.Repetition accounts for the largest proportion in these two types of speeches;self-repair is followed,and finally,pause.Besides,based on three research hypotheses,it could be concluded that the duration of disfluency in public speech is shorter than that in spontaneous speech.Further,the pitch of disfluency in these two speech styles shares a similar pattern.When it comes to different disfluencies,the intensity tends to display various features.The intensity of pause and repetition in public speech is higher than that in spontaneous speech,and the intensity of self-repair shows no significant difference between public speech and spontaneous speech.The results could exert a positive impact on EFL learner’s oral proficiency and language teaching. |
