TONE LANGUAGE SPEAKERS’ ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH INTONATION_英语专业毕业论文.docVIP

TONE LANGUAGE SPEAKERS’ ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH INTONATION 1. Introduction While the English pronunciation of second language (henceforth L2) learners is a major area of research interest, the acquisition of English intonation has not been considered to a great extent. The previous studies in this area tended to focus on intonation language speakers acquiring other intonation languages or only on production. Those studies mainly found obvious influence from the learner’s first language (henceforth L1). There are surprisingly few studies concerning tone language speakers’ acquisition of English intonation. Therefore, this study will aim to present tone language speakers’ competence in English intonation, based on data from Mandarin English speakers’ and Cantonese English speakers’ perception and comprehension of English intonation. Every language has its own intonation system; certain correlations exist between intonation patterns with special meanings. Research tells us that the difficulties in the learning of L2 intonation patterns are often due to the non-equivalence of the intonation structure of the learners’ L1 and the L2 structure (e.g. Cruz-Ferreira, 1983). Mandarin and Cantonese are tone languages and English is an intonation language, and different use is made of the acoustic components of tone and intonation in these three languages. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 will provide the theoretical background regarding tone and intonation in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. Section 3 will present hypotheses, the methodology of this study and results of the tests. Section 4 extends the discussion including the data analysis of the four non-native English groups so as to examine the hypotheses. Section 5 concludes with a summary of the major findings of this study and limitations of this research. 2. Theoretical Background Tone refers to the pitch on the individual syllable and intonation refers to the height of pitch on the sentence level.