| Stress plays a pivotal role in English prosody as English is a typical stress-timed language,whereas Chinese is a typical syllable-timed language.Incorrect stress production is often regarded as one of the most common causes of unintelligibility among Chinese English learners due to the negative transfer of native L1.Based on this background,the present study adopted an experimental design to explore the production of L2 English noun phrasal stress(NPS)by rural junior high school students(JHSSs)with the specific research questions as follows:1.To what extent do JHSSs produce target English NPS correctly?2.What are the effects of linguistic structures on JHSSs’ production of target NPS?3.What are the acoustic features of the target English NPS produced by JHSSs?4.What are the typical erroneous patterns of target English NPS produced by JHSSs?The subjects of the present study consisted of 91 JHSSs(i.e.,30,30,and 31 from Grade 1,Grade 2,and Grade 3 respectively)from a rural junior high school in the suburbs of Yangzhou.The target NPS stimuli were embedded in 24 noun phrases,which were designed in 2 linguistics structures,i.e.,two syllable structures(monosyllabic and disyllabic)and three phrasal structures(two-word,three-word and four-word).During the experiment,the subjects were required to read the target NPSs.Their production of target NPS was recorded via Cool Edit Pro 12.0 in a professional phonetic laboratory,then annotated and evaluated acoustically with Praat 6.0.19,and finally analyzed statistically with Excel 2016 and Jamovi 1.6.1.The findings of the present study are as follows:First,subjects’ overall correct production rate(CPR)of NPS was 60.81%,of which the CPRs of grade one,grade two and grade three students were 50.93%,60.92%and 63.57%respectively,demonstrating their CPRs were just about the threshold of the production in general.One-way ANOVA results presented an overall gradual increase in the CPRs of target NPS with the grades,but data analysis confirmed no significant differences between the grades,indicating no significant progress along with junior high grades.Second,Paired Samples T-Test and One Sample T-test analysis results proved that subjects’ production of target NPS was significantly affected by the linguistic structures of the noun phrases.On the one hand,the CPRs of target NPS in monosyllabic structures significantly outperformed those in disyllabic structures.On the other hand,the CPRs of target NPS decreased from the 2-word noun phrases to 3word and 4-word noun phrases,indicating the more words in a noun phrase,the lower CPRs of the phrasal stress.Both provide valid evidence for the effects of linguistic structures on the production of target NPS.Third,acoustic features of an utterance mirrored the articulation mechanism of a speaker.The acoustic features of subjects’ production of target NPS were largely variant from those of native speakers.In pitch,JHSSs pronounced significantly lower pitch range of target NPS than the native speaker.In duration,the total duration of target stressed syllables produced by JHSSs were significantly shorter than those by the native speaker.And in intensity,the subjects’ intensity values of stressed syllables in target noun phrases were lower than the native speaker’s.All these suggested that JHSSs lack basic phonological awareness and skills in how to use pitch,duration and intensity to achieve significant prominence of target English NPS.Fourth,two kinds of typical erroneous production were found in the subjects’production of target NPS.One was wrong location,subjects tended to stress modifiers,such as numerals,determiners,adjectives instead of the head noun of a noun phrase.The other was wrong realization in the articulation mechanism,i.e.,failure to use pitch,duration,and intensity correctly to distinguish the stressed and unstressed syllables in target noun phrases.The findings above shed light onto the teaching and learning of English pronunciation and intonation at Junior high schools in China. |
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