A Study On The Intelligibility Of English Fricatives Pronounced By Senior High School Students

In this research,a 2×3 between-subjects ANOVA was used to explore the effects of two factors,context and fricative position,on the intelligibility of English fricative pronunciation by senior high school students at the segmental level,and to further investigate the acoustic features of problematic pronunciations through experimental data and Praat speech diagram.The research also analyzes the reasons affecting the intelligibility of students’ fricatives based on Language Transfer Theory,Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis,Perceptual Assimilation Model,and Speech Learning Model,thereby proposing pedagogical suggestions to improve the intelligibility of students’ fricatives.Participants in this research are 24 students from a general high school in Fujian province and 5 professional teachers.Students read aloud each of the 42 target words containing fricatives with or without context,and the intelligibility is quantified according to the teachers’ transcriptions.From the statistical analysis,it can be seen that the intelligibility of fricatives in different positions is significantly different,mainly reflected in the fact that the intelligibility of fricatives located in the middle of the word is significantly higher than that of fricatives located at the beginning and the end of the word;the context can significantly affect the intelligibility of fricatives,and the intelligibility of fricatives in the absence of context is significantly lower than that in the presence of context;there is an interaction effect between fricative position and context.In the presence of context,there is no significant difference in the intelligibility of fricatives located in different positions of the word,while in the absence of context,there is a significant difference in the intelligibility of the three positions,with the highest intelligibility in the middle of the word,the second highest in the beginning of the word,and the lowest in the end of the word.Furthermore,this research compares students’ problematic pronunciations with native speakers’ pronunciations through Praat.From the spectrogram,it can be found that students’ [θ]-[s] pronunciations are all concentrated in the high-frequency part.Some voiced fricatives have unclear bars at the bottom of spectrogram.The fills of some fricatives are not obvious and vowels are added to some word-final fricatives.From the analysis of acoustic features,it can be inferred that students may experience native language transfer and perceptual bias in the process of phonological learning,and they are prone to replace an English fricative with a similar sound in their native language,thus reducing the intelligibility of pronunciation.Based on experimental phonology,this research focuses on the intelligibility of students’ fricative pronunciation and obtains the following insights.To address the influence of context on intelligibility,teachers should pay attention to the creation of contexts in actual phonics instruction,giving priority to intelligible phonetic expressions as a whole.Furthermore,according to the different features of English fricatives,the auditory discrimination and the pronunciation training of individual fricative are needed to effectively improve students’ ability to perceive English fricatives,especially for the less intelligible fricatives [θ],[z],[e] and [v] located at the end and beginning of words.Meanwhile,teachers are expected to respect students’ individual differences,expand their phonetic knowledge and create a favorable classroom environment to facilitate students’ mastery of fricatives and gradually improve the intelligibility of fricative pronunciation.