The present study aims to investigate how the acoustic cues (i.e., mean pitch, duration, and mean intensity) are utilized by Taiwanese EFL learners to produce English noun-verb stress contrasts in falling and rising intonation. In addition, we examine how English native speakers perceive the English noun-verb stress contrasts produced by Taiwanese EFL learners.
To examine English noun-verb stress contrasts in falling intonation, eight Taiwanese EFL learners, either in advanced level or intermediate level, recorded six English noun-verb stress contrasts which were put in a sentence frame (i.e., No, it is ______.), and four native speakers of English were also recruited for recording as a basis for comparison. Then, the vowels of the stressed and unstressed syllables were measured in terms of mean pitch, duration, and mean intensity. The results suggest that Taiwanese EFL learners in advanced or intermediate level produce English noun-verb stress contrasts by utilizing mean pitch, duration, and mean intensity, but the extent they utilize mean pitch is different from English native speakers. That is, they produced stressed syllables that are less high-pitched than English native speakers.
To investigate how Taiwanese EFL learners utilize the correlates to produce the English noun-verb stress contrasts in rising intonation, the same groups of speakers also recorded the six English noun-verb stress contrasts put in another sentence frame (i.e., Did you say ______?), and the vowels of the stressed and unstressed syllables were measured and analyzed. The results show that Taiwanese EFL learners, either in advanced or intermediate level, utilize duration, but not mean pitch, to produce the noun-verb contrasts, while English native speakers use both duration and mean pitch.
To examine how English native speakers perceive the English noun-verb stress contrasts with Taiwanese-accent, another eight English native speakers participated in doing several tasks including identification tasks, accent-rating tasks, and comprehensibility tasks. The results suggest that although Taiwanese EFL learners¡¦ production of the six English noun-verb stress contrasts in falling intonation was rated as foreign-accented, our eight English native speakers can identify their production with higher accuracy. In contrast, production in rising intonation was also rated as foreign-accented; however our English native speakers have difficulties in identifying their production.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0825111-014046 |
| Date | 25 August 2011 |
| Creators | Cheng, Hsiao-wen |
| Contributors | Shu-chen Ou, Shu-ing Shyu, Xu Wang |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0825111-014046 |
| Rights | user_define, Copyright information available at source archive |
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