An Examination of the Relationship Between Acoustic Measures of English Prosody and Holistic Measures of English Proficiency in Extemporaneous Speech of Native Chinese Speakers of English as a Second Language

Description

<p> English prosody works as a structural and semantic glue that establishes relationships among words and phrases within a sentence, and among sentences within a larger discourse. This dissertation hypothesizes and demonstrates an association between acoustic measurements of English prosody and holistic measures of English proficiency. To test this hypothesis, acoustic data was used from 10 examinees each of low, medium, and high oral English proficiency groups of L1 Chinese speakers who took Purdue&rsquo;s Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT). Prosodic measurements of duration, F0, and intensity were gathered from adjacent function and content words in the OEPT audio data and compared with holistic OEPT scores. An ordered logistic regression found a significant difference (p = 2.00^e-16) among the three groups for how groups used durational differences between adjacent function and content words. Parallels of mental mapping of information are proposed between acoustic treatment of function and content words and the suppression and enhancement mechanisms of Gernsbacher&rsquo;s (1997a) Structure Building Framework.</p><p>

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Tags

Linguistics|English as a second language

Additional Fields

Identifer	oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10637981
Date	17 May 2018
Creators	Johnson, Carl Tyler
Publisher	Purdue University
Source Sets	ProQuest.com
Language	English
Detected Language	English
Type	thesis