A Comparative Study on Intonation Difference Between Chinese EFL Speakers and Native English Speakers Based on Visual Phonetic Software Praat

Tianyuan XU

Abstract


Acoustic features such as intonation are attached great importance by all English learners around the world, so as the Chinese EFL speakers. The study mainly conducts a comparative study between Chinese advanced EFL speakers and native speakers, analyzing the differences in intonation and the reasons behind it. Phonetic software Praat was used to visualized these voice data after the experiment. The result shows that all these Chinese advanced EFL speakers possess the awareness of intonation variation, but the detailed intonation variation is still quite different from the native speakers. The reason for this phenomenon is that most Chinese advanced EFL speakers fail to understand the extra-linguistic information conveyed from intonation variation. Acquiring phonetic theory and correcting intonation under the assistance of visual phonetic software are two practical methods to solve this problem.


Keywords


Intonation; Pitch; Praat; Speech visualization software

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12379

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