Acoustic Analysis Of English Monophthongs Produced By Chinese EFL Learners Of Different English Proficiency

Influenced by similar vowels in foreign language learners’ native language and their learning experience,monophthongs show some deviations in acoustic features in their L2 production,which leads to lower intelligibility.Under the guidance of Speech Learning Model,this thesis studies the English monophthongs produced by Chinese EFL learners.English proficiency is taken as one variable to explore the features of monophthongs by advanced and intermediate learners.Thirty participants are invited to the study,20 are Chinese EFL learners who are proficient at Mandarin with high scores on the Putonghua Shuiping Ceshi(Level 2Grade A or above)and 10 are native speakers of American English.The 20 Chinese are divided into two groups according to their proficiency in English,with 10 at an intermediate level and the other 10 at an advanced level.The 30 participants read the eight English monophthongs /i,Ι,ε,(?),Λ,ɑ,u,(?)/ in connected speech.Acoustic features of their production are analyzed and compared.Findings are as follows:(1)On the production of individual vowels,advanced learners,in general,outperform intermediate learners.Specifically,advanced learners can produce /u/ and /(?)/ in a native-like form,which indicates that with a greater amount of L2 experience,nonnative learners can have native-like production of certain vowels.(2)On the separability of /i/-/Ι/,/ε/-/(?)/ and /u/-/(?)/,learners show a lower accuracy than native speakers.Besides,Chinese EFL learners rely more on the vowel duration in distinguishing tense-lax pairs /i/-/Ι/ and /u/-/(?)/,while native speakers of English keep a contrast both in duration and spectral features.Besides,the L2 proficiency effect only exerts on the distinctions of /i/-/Ι/ at the spectral level.(3)On the effect of L1 Chinese on L2 English,this study reveals that the productions of similar vowels /i/,/Ι/,/Λ/ are less accurate due to the influence from Mandarin similar vowels.The productions of/(?)/ and /ɑ/ are closer to that of the target language.“New” vowels /ε/ and /(?)/ and“similar” /u/ are less influenced by Mandarin and are consequently more accurately produced than other vowels.These results partially back up the claim made by the Speech Learning Model that “new” vowels may be relatively easy to acquire.